From: Jim H. <jh...@fr...> - 2004-05-31 15:50:16
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Axel C. Frinke wrote: > Hello Tom, > > On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 07:38:28PM +0200, tom ehlert wrote: > >>just age for a product is no reason to celebrate. > > yes... but maybe one just could meet each other for coriousity to > find how the FreeDOS developers are in real life? > Maybe some of them are not as rude as they sometimes sound in the > list. ;-) :-) 10 years is also a nice milestone. > BTW, I noted there are relatively much FreeDOS people living in the > area Aachen/Cologne/Bonn. Very likely. In any case, I've submitted a request on Meetup.com and asked to have a forum set up for those that wish to use it. The meetup is tentatively scheduled for 28 Jun 7:00pm (that's local time ... so 7pm in Minnesota, USA and 7pm in London, England.) I hope to have confirmation in the next week or so. Meetup.com is free. I'm already using it to get together with other Red Hat admins in my area. >>and having a *nearly* done dos clone after just 10 years is probably >>nothing to be real proud about. > > Frankly, when did the FreeDOS development really start? From my point > of view, before 1999 FreeDOS was not very interesting for practical > use (sorry, Jim). In late 2000, for the first time I had the > impression "Oh wow, FreeDOS is actually going to work!". IIRC, the Beta4 was really the first time we got a lot of attention in other forums, so I suspect that Beta4 may be the first release where things were really stable for what most people used FreeDOS for. Of course, I was booted into FreeDOS all the time since long before Alpha5 ... but I was willing to "take a hit" if things were unstable. Not so for non-developers. Beta4 was released around 27 Dec 1999. > I do not mean this insulting. I think, most FreeDOS developers work at > their free time and have to make their life with other jobs. (At least > this is my situaition; I would very likely spent more of my time for > FreeDOS development). > So, I do not see reasons to complain about slow development. IMO, a free/open software project like FreeDOS goes where its users are willing to take it. You can state your goals (become 100% MS-DOS compatible, down to every last command line option) but in reality, the developers and the users are the ones who have to get you there. If no one has a need for an old "crutch" program, then no one develops it. How long had we gone before we had an Append program (allows programs to see data files in the current directory, when in fact they are in a different directory)? So the fact that FreeDOS is not 100% MS-DOS compatible after almost 10 years of development doesn't really bother me. FreeDOS is useful to many, many people around the world, even though we don't completely mimic MS-DOS behavior everywhere. Anyway, if there's anyone here who lives in or around Minneapolis/StPaul (Minnesota) I hope to have a beer with you on the 28th. :-) -jh -- _____________________________________________________________________________ This email message has been automatically encrypted using ROT-26. |