Mail Archives: opendos/1997/04/03/15:52:45
On 2 Apr 97 at 20:53, Pedro Giffuni wrote:
> Alaric B. Williams wrote:
> > there isn't a great deal that can be done right now. Once this is
> > sorted, and Caldera can move their people away from writing makefiles
> > into fixing bugs, it might be worth reducing the licensing restrictions!
(That was, BTW, IMHO...)
> I don't buy this, if this is the licensing of the executables, I don't
> want to the see the licensing of the sources. There is no excuse for a
> "beta" licensing like this one. Hope I'm wrong though...
Well, we'll see. Last I heard ('long time ago now) Gene was pushing for
nicer licencing.
Things are very much "under construction" right now. The OpenDOS of
the future everyone is pressing for will look much different to
what currently exists. Much better, too, we hope. So do we want
the public at large's first impression of OpenDOS to be the current
one? This may or may not be Caldera's thinking, but I personally am
happy with the beta idea for now. Just indeed, things must change when
we're happy that OpenDOS is ready for Joe Public.
> There is no need to split the distribution in a first stage. Since
> IBMBIOS.COM and the other base files are only in 16-bit assembler, this
> base code must first be cleaned in order to use a free compiler, or at
> least to use only one compiler. Bugs have to be fixed, and probably some
> features added. An option could be choosing having the second and
> subsequent disks in 16 bit or 32 bit, but it seems clear the first disk
> will be 16-bit (and it should also work with DOSEMU).
That's fine by me, yes.
> I don't think we should extend MS-DOS. Microsoft doesn't care about us,
> we shouldn't care about them either.
Hmmm... it's the users we're really after. And look at it this way:
once they see how easy it is to configure the new OD apps under
MS-DOS, and the faster protected mode work and all that becomes
apparent, they (esp. tecchie types) will have a good impression
of what comes from OpenDOS - especially since the OD kernel
and memory manager can interface with the TSR to make things like
the memory management more efficient and RM/PM interfacing faster,
so the nice OD application they're running under DOS is merely
a taster of what is available, which is actually FREE as well,
they'll be ecstatic to dump MS-DOS...
> Pedro.
ABW
--
Alaric B. Williams (alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)
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