In the eyes of an extreme freetard, playing an old DOS or NES game is no different than using Windows 11, Discord, or Google Chrome.
@xianc78 Did you want a person at "free software extremist dot com" to suggest MS-DOS?
Here's a FreeDOS boot floppy.
freedos-floppy.img
Here's a FreeDOS boot floppy.
freedos-floppy.img
@xianc78 You can play the DOS port of Nethack. https://nethack.org/v343/ports/download-msdos.html
@xianc78 @p The main problem of "FreeDOS" is that you can't compile it without a proprietary compiler.
I'm not too confident about the licensing situation, but it appears that it could be free software.
The primary and only practical usage of "FreeDOS" is in fact the execution of old proprietary DOS software.
I'm not too confident about the licensing situation, but it appears that it could be free software.
The primary and only practical usage of "FreeDOS" is in fact the execution of old proprietary DOS software.
@Suiseiseki @xianc78
> you can't compile it without a proprietary compiler.
I wouldn't know; DOSBox solves enough of my problems.
I attempted to figure out what it uses but they have no documentation for this in the repo, just a script that wants to run as root and six levels of indirection. (Their build system alone appears to be much larger than any version of DOS from the DOS era.) I have a subversion checkout of it from 2009 (if you believe the timestamps) and subtracting sixteen years of bloat makes it a little easier to decipher: it looks like they have written portions of FreeDOS in C++ and they want TurboC++ for it, but I can't say for certain without solving the halting problem whether it is possible to use GCC for this. (Probably not worth the effort, because it's a C++ project: it's shit.)
> I'm not too confident about the licensing situation,
MIT.
> The primary and only practical usage of "FreeDOS" is in fact the execution of old proprietary DOS software.
If you think it is difficult to port FreeDOS to use GCC instead of TurboC++, it should be easy to acknowledge that it might be difficult to port even free software written for DOS to a more recent operating system.
Free software written for DOS does exist. Some people use DOS as a bootloader! There were Linux distributions that did this, Chuck Moore did it for Forth environments, etc.
That aside, I don't see any issues with using the computer to investigate older computers and older software; I don't know why you'd object to this.
> you can't compile it without a proprietary compiler.
I wouldn't know; DOSBox solves enough of my problems.
I attempted to figure out what it uses but they have no documentation for this in the repo, just a script that wants to run as root and six levels of indirection. (Their build system alone appears to be much larger than any version of DOS from the DOS era.) I have a subversion checkout of it from 2009 (if you believe the timestamps) and subtracting sixteen years of bloat makes it a little easier to decipher: it looks like they have written portions of FreeDOS in C++ and they want TurboC++ for it, but I can't say for certain without solving the halting problem whether it is possible to use GCC for this. (Probably not worth the effort, because it's a C++ project: it's shit.)
> I'm not too confident about the licensing situation,
MIT.
> The primary and only practical usage of "FreeDOS" is in fact the execution of old proprietary DOS software.
If you think it is difficult to port FreeDOS to use GCC instead of TurboC++, it should be easy to acknowledge that it might be difficult to port even free software written for DOS to a more recent operating system.
Free software written for DOS does exist. Some people use DOS as a bootloader! There were Linux distributions that did this, Chuck Moore did it for Forth environments, etc.
That aside, I don't see any issues with using the computer to investigate older computers and older software; I don't know why you'd object to this.
@p @xianc78 >DOSBox solves enough of my problems.
Yes, even if you intend to surrender your freedom to proprietary games, DOSBox usually offers a better experience.
>MIT.
Which one? MIT released many licenses.
Just slapping a copy of MIT expat into a repo doesn't really mean anything legally.
>it might be difficult to port even free software written for DOS to a more recent operating system.
I reckon it'll be easier to port DOS C free software than to get sepples to compile.
>Free software written for DOS does exist.
Please provide examples.
>Some people use DOS as a bootloader!
I don't see why you would do that instead of using the superior GNU GRUB.
>I don't see any issues with using the computer to investigate older computers and older software
There is mere investigation (you'll soon realize garbage it is and stop using it) and there is surrendering freedom to proprietary software.
Yes, even if you intend to surrender your freedom to proprietary games, DOSBox usually offers a better experience.
>MIT.
Which one? MIT released many licenses.
Just slapping a copy of MIT expat into a repo doesn't really mean anything legally.
>it might be difficult to port even free software written for DOS to a more recent operating system.
I reckon it'll be easier to port DOS C free software than to get sepples to compile.
>Free software written for DOS does exist.
Please provide examples.
>Some people use DOS as a bootloader!
I don't see why you would do that instead of using the superior GNU GRUB.
>I don't see any issues with using the computer to investigate older computers and older software
There is mere investigation (you'll soon realize garbage it is and stop using it) and there is surrendering freedom to proprietary software.
@Suiseiseki @xianc78
> Which one? MIT released many licenses.
The one commonly called "the MIT license".
> Just slapping a copy of MIT expat into a repo doesn't really mean anything legally.
The author grants a license; if the author says a license is the public license, that's the license the author has granted.
> I reckon it'll be easier to port DOS C free software than to get sepples to compile.
Yeah, but although with Unix there's some amount of pressure (provided by the APIs available to developers) to use C, there was no such pressure with DOS. People used assembly half the time, people wrote code in random dialects of Pascal. On top of that, the "API" half the time was "write to video memory" or "trigger this BIOS interrupt". It's not easy to translate, even if it's C code.
> Please provide examples.
Impulse Tracker is BSD-licensed now. It's written in assembly, so porting is effectively a rewrite. I think you probably know this, but tools for composing music or drawing, people get attached to them, they're not easy to replace.
> I don't see why you would do that instead of using the superior GNU GRUB.
Well, aside from GRUB not having existed for a long time, if I had to pick a bootloader, I'd pick DOS before picking GRUB.
> There is mere investigation (you'll soon realize garbage it is and stop using it)
Well, of course it's all garbage: most DOS software doesn't even have resource-sharing via 9P. But people have put a lot of effort into SIMH, for example. It's difficult to tell if you've ported something competently without being able to run the old version.
> Which one? MIT released many licenses.
The one commonly called "the MIT license".
> Just slapping a copy of MIT expat into a repo doesn't really mean anything legally.
The author grants a license; if the author says a license is the public license, that's the license the author has granted.
> I reckon it'll be easier to port DOS C free software than to get sepples to compile.
Yeah, but although with Unix there's some amount of pressure (provided by the APIs available to developers) to use C, there was no such pressure with DOS. People used assembly half the time, people wrote code in random dialects of Pascal. On top of that, the "API" half the time was "write to video memory" or "trigger this BIOS interrupt". It's not easy to translate, even if it's C code.
> Please provide examples.
Impulse Tracker is BSD-licensed now. It's written in assembly, so porting is effectively a rewrite. I think you probably know this, but tools for composing music or drawing, people get attached to them, they're not easy to replace.
> I don't see why you would do that instead of using the superior GNU GRUB.
Well, aside from GRUB not having existed for a long time, if I had to pick a bootloader, I'd pick DOS before picking GRUB.
> There is mere investigation (you'll soon realize garbage it is and stop using it)
Well, of course it's all garbage: most DOS software doesn't even have resource-sharing via 9P. But people have put a lot of effort into SIMH, for example. It's difficult to tell if you've ported something competently without being able to run the old version.
@Suiseiseki @p @xianc78
>>The main problem of "FreeDOS" is that you can't compile it without a proprietary compiler.
>https://www.freedos.org/about/devel/
>https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/blob/master/build.bat#L10
>https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/-/blob/master/SOURCE/FDISK/Makefile (OpenWatcom)
>https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/-/blob/master/SOURCE/FDISK/Makefile.gcc (I16 Gcc)
>OpenWatcom (OSI approved, ie not proprietary)
>NASM (BSD 2-clause, ie not proprietary)
Again, you don't even know what you are talking about.
>>The main problem of "FreeDOS" is that you can't compile it without a proprietary compiler.
>https://www.freedos.org/about/devel/
>https://github.com/FDOS/kernel/blob/master/build.bat#L10
>https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/-/blob/master/SOURCE/FDISK/Makefile (OpenWatcom)
>https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/fdisk/-/blob/master/SOURCE/FDISK/Makefile.gcc (I16 Gcc)
>OpenWatcom (OSI approved, ie not proprietary)
>NASM (BSD 2-clause, ie not proprietary)
Again, you don't even know what you are talking about.
@phnt @Suiseiseki @xianc78
> OSI approved
Okay but the OSI is a shit-man place and the license does suck: https://opensource.org/license/sybase-php
> OSI approved
Okay but the OSI is a shit-man place and the license does suck: https://opensource.org/license/sybase-php
@p @Suiseiseki @xianc78 It does suck, but it's still better than being source-available. The worst part of is probably the requirement to publish your modified source even when used privately. It's not FSF approved, because they disagreed with that part of the license.
