From: Christopher Croughton <crough45 AT amc DOT de>
Message-Id: <97Sep11.123635gmt+0100.11656@internet01.amc.de>
Subject: Re: ClosedDOS???
To: patv AT iop DOT com (Pat Villani)
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 11:41:49 +0100
Cc: crough45 AT amc DOT de, patv AT server1 DOT iop DOT com, opendos AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <3417C07A.FF6@iop.com> from "Pat Villani" at Sep 11, 97 10:57:15 am
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Pat Villani wrote:

> Help me understand this point.  I was personally disappointed about a
> month or so ago when a discussion popped up on the FreeDOS mailing
> list.  There was a group of people who came out and basically demanded
> that I finish the project quickly.  I was quite involved at work at the
> time, working on the next major release of our product.  This included
> some overtime, so spare time was nil.  When I tried to explain this, I
> was confronted with a selfish attitude, basically stating that these
> individuals didn't care if I was busy, they just wanted a DOS clone for
> free.

I don't know where you advertised FreeDOS.  It sounds like you got a load
lusers interested and none of the real developer types, for some reason.
I'll certainly not deny that there are a lot of people who just want
something free, but they seem to be a minority for DJGPP and Linux for
some reason (OK, with Linux they probably go away when they realise that
they actually have to learn how to use it).

I think you've gotten burned, and I'm sorry for that.  This bad experience
seems to have soured you to any free software endeavour, and that's a pity.
Much the same, in fact, as OpenDOS has soured us to commercial vendors.

I can assure you that there are many people who aren't like that, and who
do indeed understand the idea of doing something in your free time.  Give
us a try...

> My experience has been as follows -- there are lots of folks who are
> willing to support a free software product as long as they don't
> contribute.  At one point in your reply, you said that people
> contributed by testing the alpha and beta software.  They really
> didn't.  

You see, in my experience the majority of people who try to use a
system still in development aren't the MSdrones, they tend to be
people who realise that it's not perfect and try to help.

> What I got were people who would just send me email saying that
> it was "buggy" and I rarely got much out of them when I tried to find
> out what the conditions were when the failure occurred, i.e., what
> program, specific user actions that triggered the failure, etc.  

Believe me, I know the type.  Lusers.  No use to anyone.  Did you get none
of the people who knew how to report bugs, at all?

> I've
> also gotten quite a few FreeDOS supporters who did write code but
> basically "threw it over the fence" when they were done.  I've had to go
> in and make changes when bugs occurred.

Been there, done that (both sides!).  And if there's no defined coding
standard (like GNU tends to encourage) you're lost.

> My question then is as follows: why did you support OpenDOS when there
> were other DOS clones available such as RxDOS and FreeDOS?  FreeDOS was
> and still is GPL with full source for the kernel and utilities.  What
> was the deciding factor that made you choose OpenDOS?  Also, what is the
> real operating system you would want to write?

Because I never heard of RxDOS and found it very difficult to find out
anything about FreeDOS.  Also because OpenDOS promised to be (and wasn't)
an already working system which was 99+% compatible with MSDOS applications,
just needing tweaking and enhancements.

As I said in my other message, I don't have time to mess around with
the start of systems which won't allow me to work for a long time.  I
did the same with Linux and with DJGPP - in the early versions they
weren't really usable or stable enough.  I need to get things done,
primarily, and if on the way I can report (or hopefully fix) some bugs,
or make enhancements, then that's a Good Thing but it's not my primary
reason for using the OS.

As for the 'real' OS I would write if I had the time - oh, it combines
Unix, VMS, and even bits of DOS and Windows, with being able to run
transparently applications from all of them <g>.  But as it is, I'll
settle for writing Linux applications, utilities and libraries, and
hopefully they'll also run under MSDOS using DJGPP.

> You can reply to me personally.  I won't burn any more bandwidth here.

Your message deserved a public reply.  And do feel free to post more here
if you feel you have something to contribute.  Heck, I think we needed
your rant, it at least forced us to justify our position and you probably
weren't the only person thinking what you wrote.  Challenge is not all
bad.

(And I'd appreciate more information on FreeDOS if you can point me to it,
having been disillusioned with OpenDOS perhaps it's time to check out the
alternatives again...)

Chris