These are great things to do if you want to buld a community around a project (which does help keep it going). But it's also OK to just build what you want and publish that and then maybe accept contributions under whatever terms you feel like. Community management really is an entirely different skillset from software developement and I wouldn't want anyone to be discouraged from open sourcing their software if they are not a "people person" and don't want to deal with all that. Just sharing your work already makes the world better and you are NOT required to do anything more than that.
Back in the day, Open Source projects thrived on the enthusiasm of creators who didn't view software development as a means to make money. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to build a community and create superior products through collaboration.
However, the landscape has shifted. When an Open Source project becomes successful today, creators often transition the original product into a proprietary version with added features and support, available only through paid access. This practice undermines the original Open Source project, and usually end off killing the original project.
> they saw it as an opportunity to build a community
Many small open source projects still operate this way and their community consists a small number of people who have fun hacking on a project together after work.
But as projects grow some of them acquiesce to end-user expectations and slowly turn into "organizations".
They have schedules and regular releases, commit to timely triaging of bug reports, provide forums for end-user support, publish status updates, respond to feature requests, write documentation, have a slick website with a nice logo, form committees and sub-committees to make decisions, adopt codes of conduct to try to deal with the jerks who invariably show up, file the paperwork necessary to deal with big donations, etc -- all the "necessary bureaucracy" that comes with being a large, reputable organization.
At that point you've basically added back all the unfun parts of working and turned it into a second job, so why not get paid?
Much of the money that flows into OSS foundations goes to director salaries and unproductive projects.
Some developers get paid by companies, but they usually come late to the project when most fundamental work has been done already (this depends on the project, Linux for example might be an exception in that sponsorship has started comparatively early).
Most developers who have done fundamental work before the commercialization of OSS get nothing. The beneficiaries of the whole thing are developers who are now 25-30, work for FAANG and take over existing projects while not doing really much.
BTW, the real jerks are often wolves in sheep's clothing who do excessively well in the bureaucratic apparatus.
I stay anonymous, but I built some software that people use for scientific analysis. I give it away; I don't put it on my resume; the only thing I've gotten from it is it makes me a bit happy that maybe I've saved someone else hundreds of hours of work. There's also some subtle numerical properties that take real work to get right.
(Not all, but some) people demand support, features, or bugfixes; and on their schedule. Or docs, or a prettier site, or blah blah blah, and every second of this takes away time from my real job, my now elderly dog, hobbies, etc. Recently there was a wave of it from some library weirdness on m-chip macs, which I don't even own. And they're guaranteed to get very pissy when I tell them I don't care at all (and, in several cases, if they want me to care they can start by shipping me a new mac and I'll think about it). I honestly mostly just delete the emails anymore because reading them makes me wonder why I'm wasting time on a computer.
As I mentioned, sharing makes me happy and feel like I gave a bit back, but all the shit that comes after that is ugh.
Deleting inappropriate requests is totally reasonable, but one alternative could be a template letter, if you don't happen to have one already. When I receive inappropriate demands for my time I find it hard to muster the sympathy necessary to write a kind and patient message explaining that their priorities are not my priorities. It's much easier if I have something ready to go.
I think this a consequence of the open-source marketing strategy of big tech companies and commercialization the parent talked about. When developers use open-source, most of the time maintainers are paid and it’s part of their job, and of the parent company’s strategy.
In this landscape it’s unfortunate but I think one way to avoid this especially if published on GitHub is to be upfront in the README that this is a hobby project with no support, only to be used professionally at your own risks (buried in the license is not enough). Otherwise if projects are presented too similarly to professional ones it’s fair to expect developers to be confused, it’s just unfortunate to what GitHub has turned and that the burden is on hobbyist maintainers to differentiate now but that’s where we are.
And also unfortunate is the practice of resume building by publishing professional looking projects on GitHub that adds to the confusion.
I like the idea of a standardized way of conveying where the project exists on a spectrum of personal hobby to foundation. I'd personally imagine four levels:
Level 0: This code meets (met?) my personal needs. I'm pleased if you find it useful but do not expect a response to suggestions or bug reports.
Level 1: This tool has a solo maintainer. I'll do my best to incorporate suggestions that fit my vision and address bug reports with reproduction steps when I have free time.
Level 2: This project is maintained by a handful of like-minded contributors. Besides suggestions and bug reports, if you're interested in contributing, please join our discord/element/forum/listserv.
Level 3: This project is maintained by an organization. Before submitting a bug report, please read our wiki.
Back in the day, most users were more technical (TFA is about a regular user using DOS, just as an example) so the ratio of contributors to users was higher
When a FOSS project gets big now, users show up in the issue trackers expecting the kind of support they are accustomed to from companies. They do not have the desire or ability to contribute.
Maintainers then get overwhelmed unless they have some way to support these users. Either they can raise money somehow in order to hire help -- like adding a proprietary version -- or get burned out and complain they didn't get enough donations.
This is just reality. We don't live in RMS's MIT computer lab where he set all the passwords to empty because computers should be free and everyone (every MIT student) is capable of writing software and thus should be able to.
Regular people just want to use the software and they will always outnumber contributors from now on.
Just building what you want and publishing it doesn't work anymore. Look at the countless projects wilting away because the "community" actively ignores them and the huge volume of content doesn't target those projects anymore. No tutorials, no guides, no evangelists, no Github stars and forks, no Twitter promoters, no fancy shmancy *.io domain and interactive Docs with oodles of integrations with everything under the sun means that your project will languish in ignored obscurity. Two big-ish projects getting that treatment that I've personally witnessed happening in slow-motion over many years: Tornado and Knockout.js.
I think there's a difference of opinion here about what it means for it to "work". The point I infer from the parent comment (which I happen to agree with) is that measuring success or failure in terms of the community is orthogonal to open source. If what you want is a successful community, then it makes sense to base your decision on whether to be open source or not on that, but failing to build a long-lasting community isn't a failure of open source itself but at using it as a tool to try to achieve a specific goal, and not everyone doing open source shares that goal.
As an aside, I think it's worth noting that most attempts to build long-lasting, vibrant communities for software fail, regardless of whether they're open source or not. Open source might not have a high success rate of community-building, but neither does proprietary software (or whatever middle ground you consider to be in the space between those terms, like "open core" or "source available"). If what you care about most is building a large community, the more effective choice probably depends on a lot of factors specific to what you're building and what else is going on at the time you're trying than something as simple as "always be open source" or "always be proprietary".
This is perhaps a good example of a project being more than the product. By which I mean, we don't really need it - it serves no practical purpose, and yet it continues.
Of course I generalise, but the original premise ("I liked the command line") is amply served by Linux, Mac or Windows. The other original motivations are similarly obsolete now.
All of which is irrelevant. It remains an active project "just because" and isn't that the purest form of Free Software? Sure it's "useless" but we make it because we can, and because we want to.
Perhaps that's the biggest Open Source Community lesson of all- build something that the community enjoys making, unburdened by a large userbase, unburdened by popularity, or usefulness. It's gathered like-minded people who enjoy the journey more than the destination.
So tip of the hat to you all. FreeDOS is an example of capturing the heart of programming - code that doesn't need a reason beyond "because we wanted to."
You can create a DOS-bootable USB flash drive by downloading and saving a FreeDOS operating system image. The bootable USB flash drive can then be used for testing and troubleshooting any component on your PC.
FreeDOS helps sell PC hardware without the expense of a Windows license, for customers who would like to install Linux, OpenBSD, or separately licensed Windows, e.g. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02628224.pdf
The "helping sell hardware without Windows" part is actually more like "helps PC vendors exploit a legal loophole and Microsoft keep its market share". They could just as easily install Ubuntu/whatever on computers that don't ship with Windows, but that might make some people stick with it and immediately install Windows on it. But if they put a useless OS like FreeDOS on there, they can check the "has OS" box, as well as the "no bundled license" box, without any risk to Microsoft's market dominance.
Hell, I think HP actually did put Linux on some of their laptops, but just as a compatibility layer to run FreeDOS, since they couldn't get it to work directly. This was clearly done for Microsoft's benefit and nobody else's - don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
“If it weren’t for _, it would surely be the year of Linux on the desktop” is not a new cry, but I don’t think I’ve seen FreeDOS used as the culprit before. Funny stuff.
I don't think this practice is in Microsoft's interest. People who buy a PC with FreeDOS usually install a pirated copy of Windows (or Linux, but not sure what the exact proportion of those is), which definitely doesn't contribute to M$'s bottom line...
Microsoft is the reason why this practice exists in the first place. Their Windows distribution contracts with OEMs say that all computers that an OEM ships must be preloaded with an OS (likely for the piracy issue you mention). Shipping FreeDOS allows OEMs to sell computers to people who don't want to pay for Windows licenses while also not having to provide support for Linux (or some other alternative OS).
On the contrary, being the primary desktop OS that everyone uses and thus everyone supports is Windows' biggest advantage. Anything that helps thingns stays that way contributes to Microsofts bottom line.
> Barton recalled O'Grady suggesting it would be great for developers "if you took one of your laptops, put Ubuntu on it, and just got it to work. We said that's an awesome idea, but it'll never happen, because we're talking about Dell. Our laptops need to deliver huge volumes and revenue. When I talked to one of our higher-ups about the volumes that we thought we would sell, he said, 'Yeah, that's what we sell in Belgium on Tuesday, between three and four in the afternoon.' Despite this disheartening evaluation, when Dell started an in-house innovation fund, Barton pitched it again. This time, he was granted $40,000 to pursue the idea.
What's the functional difference between FreeDOS and some executables "for testing and troubleshooting any component" versus UEFI binaries for the same?
UEFI is roughly a modernized subset of DOS in firmware, with saner calling conventions.
As I pointed out the "uselessness" is a generalization, although perhaps your suggestion of use cases rather proves my point.
Firstly "selling pcs without Windows". If you want to sell a machine without windows feel free to ship it with Linux or indeed nothing. Yes, FreeDOS is an option, but it's not unique.
Sure, some techs find it useful as a bare-metal hardware diagnostic tool. Presenting that micro niche as a use case kinda proves the point. (I'm not sure how FreeDOS fares with supporting new hardware but I'll assume it does. My experience with BSD doesn't make me over-optimistic though.)
But I think you missed my point. The main utility of FreeDOS is FreeDOS. It doesn't need to be more than that.
That requires the OEM to support Linux on the device. This has only been done for select devices, e.g. Dell XPS, and was a major undertaking.
> Presenting that micro niche as a use case kinda proves the point
Everything is a niche until you need it, e.g. installing a BIOS update from FreeDOS USB drive, without needing an OEM-certified Linux or Windows install for firmware distribution.
I don't think examples of FreeDOS being useful 'prove [your] point' about FreeDOS being useless. I think the word 'useless' is an overstatement that's very easy to quibble over, and which therefore gets in the way of you getting your overall point across.
I think your overall point, ars gratia artis, is correct. People have a proclivity for trying to quantify the 'success' of OSS projects by virtue of user counts, use cases, etc, and yet all such measures are totally irrelevant for a non-profit project. There could be a single maintainer and a single user, and so long as they're both happy, the project is a success.
I think FreeDOS shows why worrying about something being "useless" isn't so productive: it probably seemed somewhat "useless" at the time, but ended up being more useful to more people, and for a much longer time, than initially predicted. Did anyone predict that it would be so useful, decades later, for the tech-support use-cases it enjoys now?
There are many thousands of DOS programs still in active use today -- and not just by hobbyists or for educational purposes, in active commercial use, if you require economically productive criteria to consider something practical: Many industrial control systems still used every day operate through DOS applications written in the 1980s.
Spending a lot of time and money on a complete rewrite upgrade to make these control systems to use some other OS 'just because' would serve no practical purpose. They work fine on DOS. It would be expensive and risky to change that.
At the same time, MS-DOS has been unmaintained for decades. FreeDOS is almost entirely compatible with MS-DOS applications, and is still actively maintained with bugfixes and so on.
FreeDOS sounds like a very practical option indeed.
If the control systems have hard real-time requirements, FreeDOS may be one of the few options. (At least I assume FreeDOS is, since MS-DOS was.) Presumably it's a lot cheaper than QNX, too.
FreeDOS has a benefit: in case you do not need or want a more complicated operating system than DOS. Another benefit is in case your intention is to run DOS programs on the computer.
FreeDOS is pretty useful if you happen to need it.
Back in the day my go-to method for making DOS boot disks was to find a win9x machine and type "format /s". That used to be easy to do, but there are no more abundant Win9x machines anymore. FreeDOS was an alternative to that.
The last time I used FreeDOS was a few years ago to flash a bios update that required DOS to do so.
> Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.. WordStar, George R.R. Martin's favorite word processor, also runs happily in FreeDOS.
I've installed Asahi on my Mac and so far have been happily computing with the following
Emacs
Firefox
foot (terminal)
swaywm (and the associated utilities)
KeepassXC (password management)
mpd (music)
calibre (ebooks)
mpv (for the few local videos I still watch on my computer)
evince (for pdfs)
various cli utilities
What I like about these is how consistent it is. No sneaky updates that shuffle things around (I don't mind learning new stuff, but I don't like to have my workflows break for no sensible reason). If WordStar was everything I needed, I wouldn't want Office 365 either.
My personal software setup is almost identical :D. The only differences are: I use EMMS in Emacs for music, pdf-tools in Emacs for PDFs, and I also use mpv for remote videos (with pipe-viewer for YouTube).
I have spent more than a decade now working to GPL-ize as much of my stack as possible, carefully evaluating and picking my tools, and what you touch on is huge: a consistent, reliable, small footprint stack that is easily auditable is a bigger deal than people realize.
Extremely anodyne — given that the author has maintained FreeDOS for longer than I've been alive, I was hoping for slightly more interesting ideas than "have a website and be nice to people." Not that I disagree with his advice!
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nostalgia. Many FOSS projects feed on collective or obsessive nostalgia. I should know having contributed to some and following many. DOS is also sister project to retro gaming, a deep well for those fuzzy feelings.
That said, Hall does offer good and sensible advice to keep the community together and civil.
I think it is better to summarize the article with: open and positive communication is at the core of collaborative open source software. While the message may seem trite, it is also a message that many open source developers need to hear.
Sure, but building a community is not easy and it’s good to reinforce that there are no shortcuts.
I think I would pretty a suspicious of a blog akin to “Linus Torvlads wants this website banned - build an enthusiastic and productive OSS community in just one week with this one neat trick.”
Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?
I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?
One prominent example, Rust started off with mailing lists but shut them off a decade ago or so. Many other projects I participate in or follow have moved their communication to other means, Discord and Discourse are popular, sometimes the mailing lists remain but are silent, sometimes they are removed.
Both Discourse and Discord seem entirely inappropriate for FOSS projects -- they are both proprietary walled-garden SaaS applications that aren't themselves consistent with FOSS principles, and they are both exclusively web-based with close coupling between the UI and the underlying functionality, which makes it difficult or impossible for users to access, log, and archive messages with tools most optimal for their own workflow.
FOSS projects should communicate over open protocols with a variety of interoperable implementations -- whether with tried and true tools like NNTP, mailing lists, and IRC, or more novel solutions like Matrix -- instead of allowing a proprietary third-party web application to present a one-size-fits-all interface and function as a single point of failure for project coordination.
Discord is definitely inappropriate, but Discourse is open source and has an API for anyone's custom use, including stuff like RSS feeds. I've been dealing with email since the 80's, and I'm quite familiar with the power of email clients, but for any given project I'd much rather use Discourse. While email clients have message organization down pat, the UI for content itself is retrograde, and email deliverability is a complete crapshoot and getting worse every year. On a web forum, when you see your post, you can be pretty sure everyone else will see that post too.
You can shake your fist against the tide as much as you want, but a lot of projects are populated entirely from people who grew up after the web was born, and their members see no need to keep looking back to a system designed for a world before TCP/IP itself.
You're trying to make this into an old vs. new argument, but I'm just looking at good vs. bad. Discourse being self-hostable FOSS certainly ameliorates that part of my criticism, but it still suffers from being a web-only application with close coupling between functionality and presentation, and contrary to your complaint about "retrograde" UIs, I find Discourse's interface to be quite slow and disorganized, and offers a "narrow" view of discussion, in contrast to more mature UIs' "broad" view.
"Message organization" is one of the most significant elements of this particular use case. Maintaining well-organized archives is extremely important, and it's not enough for messages merely to be searchable -- they should be easily browseable by topic and time range.
Of course Discourse is searchable, it wouldn't be much of a discussion board if it wasn't. Many Discourse-based fora I've been on even do a live search as you type the subject of a post, something that turns out really handy for community support boards.
Discord's lack of searchability is certainly a biggie, but having all history locked away and unexportable in any way is the worst part of it.
And damn the two similar names are confusing, I find myself typing one when I meant the other...
Several projects I'm interested in have gone to Discourse. I don't mind the Web interface but the infantile notifications I receive and the nonsense the application sticks into a thread are annoying at best and add nothing to the usefulness of the forum. It otherwise detracts from what should be technical discussions.
Another annoyance are projects that choose to autolock threads in Discourse. On a technical forum such actions are unwarranted as there are times when an investigation can take months and remembering to add a nonsense post to keep a thread from autolocking doesn't always happen. So, a collection of disjoined threads result and even with links to the prior thread(s) the flow of investigation is greatly disrupted. SMH
I think we should establish a term for “FOSS and contributing to the project or getting support does not require using proprietary software”. Strongly FOSS?
I've contributed to two, and neither used mailing lists. One lived in discord, the other handled comms via github issues and project contributor messaging.
Yes, CPython moved to Discourse and then censored the mailing lists, which are now defunct. Discourse offers superior tracking and censoring abilities, so only those who have the right opinions and work for the right corporations can be heard.
The fact that there is little real progress can be suppressed.
I can't speak to running a mailing list but guaranteeing delivery to everyone is already a hard task with just one user. Primary difficulty will be getting an IP in a "clean" subnet - the IP that comes with a cheapo VPS will have random neighbors that you can't control and who might get the whole /24 onto blacklists again and again. If you are ok with writing off e.g. Microsoft (hosted Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) or whoever gives you trouble then that makes things easier. This is fine for personal mail depending on what your friends use but with a public service you are going to run into users with problems receiving mail from a random VPS.
There's a whole bunch of ways to run a project. Some of them don't really involve "running a project" in the first place and are just the work of one person. Others have very different social dynamics than FreeDOS. If you want to be an asshole to everyone you perceive to be an idiot, then ... you can do that. You're allowed. I'm not saying it's the kind of project I'm very likely to contribute to, but not everything needs to suit my preferences.
Besides, many social conventions "exclude" people. I was once reprimanded for using the phrase "getting shit done" because any profanity, no matter the context, is forbidden, apparently. I felt that was childish and infantile enough that I didn't really feel like being part of that.
In the end all that's needed is publishing the code. You don't need to care about community or anything. You can, but don't need to.
>Besides, many social conventions "exclude" people.
All social conventions exclude people. There's no way to be inclusive of everyone. For an extreme example, if you allow Nazi ideology in a place, for instance, that excludes people who won't put up with that or who the Nazis chase away. But if you disallow Nazi ideology, then you're excluding Nazis. Of course, this will devolve into Popper's paradox of tolerance, but the point is, you can't please everyone. Someone's always going to be excluded by whatever social conventions you put in place. You just have to decide which groups of people you're willing to exclude.
A less controversial example than nazis (sigh) might be requiring basic hygiene.
If you don't exclude people who don't exhibit basic hygiene (e.g. smelling like literal shit), then a whole lot of casuals will be driven away. If you do exclude them, you exclude them.
Now, you might say, "what exactly is the difference between nazis and some people who smell like actual shit? you just swapped some words out", but, you see,
>A less controversial example than nazis (sigh) might be requiring basic hygiene.
I'm not sure why Nazis are "controversial". They're generally the universal boogeymen. Although these days, it does seem like some Nazi ideology has become more popular in some places in recent years...
When we test software, one thing we normally do is look for edge cases, and test those. If the program works with the edge cases, then it can handle any cases. So picking Nazis for my extreme example is just my use of an edge case to illustrate my point about the limits of inclusivity, and also points to Popper's paradox of tolerance, since the Nazis were the poster-child for intolerance.
But yeah, for a workplace setting, for instance, excluding people lacking basic hygiene (smelling like shit) is a good example. I've actually had problems like this at work, unfortunately (with coworkers smelling like this, not me!).
That's the problem actually. It's so strong that it makes it more difficult for the principle to be applied for what is less strong. Also in some place it has also been overused to the point it's not effective because you don't know if the people accused are really nazi or not (in my country even left politicians may be called literal fascists by others at the left)
The percentage of people who are called Nazis who are actually them is probably higher than you realize, because the word "Nazi" makes people think of concentration camps, and we don't see those, even though the Nazis did over a decade of other bad stuff before that. A Nazi accusation isn't saying someone runs a concentration camp - it's saying when there are concentration camps, they probably will.
In short, the problem with using Nazi's as a comparison is the strong emotional reactions people are prone to experience. (Justifiably so to be clear)
When a person invokes the Nazi's while discussing subjects that aren't nearly as heavy (emotionally speaking) the horrors of everything Nazi related, they're leave themselves open to being perceived as hyperbolic. No matter how strongly one might feel about open source, the subject matter is just simply on a different emotional level than all the horror which is Nazi. (and therefore, ought not to used as a comparison)
And again just to be clear, I'm not accusing you of being hyperbolic personally, I just want to elaborate on why some people groan when they see Nazi's beings inserted into topics which they have nothing to do with.
These are great things to do if you want to buld a community around a project (which does help keep it going). But it's also OK to just build what you want and publish that and then maybe accept contributions under whatever terms you feel like. Community management really is an entirely different skillset from software developement and I wouldn't want anyone to be discouraged from open sourcing their software if they are not a "people person" and don't want to deal with all that. Just sharing your work already makes the world better and you are NOT required to do anything more than that.
Back in the day, Open Source projects thrived on the enthusiasm of creators who didn't view software development as a means to make money. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity to build a community and create superior products through collaboration.
However, the landscape has shifted. When an Open Source project becomes successful today, creators often transition the original product into a proprietary version with added features and support, available only through paid access. This practice undermines the original Open Source project, and usually end off killing the original project.
> they saw it as an opportunity to build a community
Many small open source projects still operate this way and their community consists a small number of people who have fun hacking on a project together after work.
But as projects grow some of them acquiesce to end-user expectations and slowly turn into "organizations".
They have schedules and regular releases, commit to timely triaging of bug reports, provide forums for end-user support, publish status updates, respond to feature requests, write documentation, have a slick website with a nice logo, form committees and sub-committees to make decisions, adopt codes of conduct to try to deal with the jerks who invariably show up, file the paperwork necessary to deal with big donations, etc -- all the "necessary bureaucracy" that comes with being a large, reputable organization.
At that point you've basically added back all the unfun parts of working and turned it into a second job, so why not get paid?
Much of the money that flows into OSS foundations goes to director salaries and unproductive projects.
Some developers get paid by companies, but they usually come late to the project when most fundamental work has been done already (this depends on the project, Linux for example might be an exception in that sponsorship has started comparatively early).
Most developers who have done fundamental work before the commercialization of OSS get nothing. The beneficiaries of the whole thing are developers who are now 25-30, work for FAANG and take over existing projects while not doing really much.
BTW, the real jerks are often wolves in sheep's clothing who do excessively well in the bureaucratic apparatus.
People also just get wildly entitled.
I stay anonymous, but I built some software that people use for scientific analysis. I give it away; I don't put it on my resume; the only thing I've gotten from it is it makes me a bit happy that maybe I've saved someone else hundreds of hours of work. There's also some subtle numerical properties that take real work to get right.
(Not all, but some) people demand support, features, or bugfixes; and on their schedule. Or docs, or a prettier site, or blah blah blah, and every second of this takes away time from my real job, my now elderly dog, hobbies, etc. Recently there was a wave of it from some library weirdness on m-chip macs, which I don't even own. And they're guaranteed to get very pissy when I tell them I don't care at all (and, in several cases, if they want me to care they can start by shipping me a new mac and I'll think about it). I honestly mostly just delete the emails anymore because reading them makes me wonder why I'm wasting time on a computer.
As I mentioned, sharing makes me happy and feel like I gave a bit back, but all the shit that comes after that is ugh.
Thanks for your contributions!
Deleting inappropriate requests is totally reasonable, but one alternative could be a template letter, if you don't happen to have one already. When I receive inappropriate demands for my time I find it hard to muster the sympathy necessary to write a kind and patient message explaining that their priorities are not my priorities. It's much easier if I have something ready to go.
I think this a consequence of the open-source marketing strategy of big tech companies and commercialization the parent talked about. When developers use open-source, most of the time maintainers are paid and it’s part of their job, and of the parent company’s strategy.
In this landscape it’s unfortunate but I think one way to avoid this especially if published on GitHub is to be upfront in the README that this is a hobby project with no support, only to be used professionally at your own risks (buried in the license is not enough). Otherwise if projects are presented too similarly to professional ones it’s fair to expect developers to be confused, it’s just unfortunate to what GitHub has turned and that the burden is on hobbyist maintainers to differentiate now but that’s where we are.
And also unfortunate is the practice of resume building by publishing professional looking projects on GitHub that adds to the confusion.
I like the idea of a standardized way of conveying where the project exists on a spectrum of personal hobby to foundation. I'd personally imagine four levels:
Level 0: This code meets (met?) my personal needs. I'm pleased if you find it useful but do not expect a response to suggestions or bug reports.
Level 1: This tool has a solo maintainer. I'll do my best to incorporate suggestions that fit my vision and address bug reports with reproduction steps when I have free time.
Level 2: This project is maintained by a handful of like-minded contributors. Besides suggestions and bug reports, if you're interested in contributing, please join our discord/element/forum/listserv.
Level 3: This project is maintained by an organization. Before submitting a bug report, please read our wiki.
That's fairly rare, when you consider the massive amount of open source. There's also many good examples of open core projects.
But the risk is always lurking. I guess this holds of some from contributing to open source projects, fearing this fate.
This is extremely easy to avoid in practice, just don't contribute to projects that make you sign a CLA.
Back in the day, most users were more technical (TFA is about a regular user using DOS, just as an example) so the ratio of contributors to users was higher
When a FOSS project gets big now, users show up in the issue trackers expecting the kind of support they are accustomed to from companies. They do not have the desire or ability to contribute.
Maintainers then get overwhelmed unless they have some way to support these users. Either they can raise money somehow in order to hire help -- like adding a proprietary version -- or get burned out and complain they didn't get enough donations.
This is just reality. We don't live in RMS's MIT computer lab where he set all the passwords to empty because computers should be free and everyone (every MIT student) is capable of writing software and thus should be able to.
Regular people just want to use the software and they will always outnumber contributors from now on.
Just building what you want and publishing it doesn't work anymore. Look at the countless projects wilting away because the "community" actively ignores them and the huge volume of content doesn't target those projects anymore. No tutorials, no guides, no evangelists, no Github stars and forks, no Twitter promoters, no fancy shmancy *.io domain and interactive Docs with oodles of integrations with everything under the sun means that your project will languish in ignored obscurity. Two big-ish projects getting that treatment that I've personally witnessed happening in slow-motion over many years: Tornado and Knockout.js.
I think there's a difference of opinion here about what it means for it to "work". The point I infer from the parent comment (which I happen to agree with) is that measuring success or failure in terms of the community is orthogonal to open source. If what you want is a successful community, then it makes sense to base your decision on whether to be open source or not on that, but failing to build a long-lasting community isn't a failure of open source itself but at using it as a tool to try to achieve a specific goal, and not everyone doing open source shares that goal.
As an aside, I think it's worth noting that most attempts to build long-lasting, vibrant communities for software fail, regardless of whether they're open source or not. Open source might not have a high success rate of community-building, but neither does proprietary software (or whatever middle ground you consider to be in the space between those terms, like "open core" or "source available"). If what you care about most is building a large community, the more effective choice probably depends on a lot of factors specific to what you're building and what else is going on at the time you're trying than something as simple as "always be open source" or "always be proprietary".
Languishing in ignored obscurity is fine for the stuff I open source. There's no expectations but it's not hidden from anyone either.
Congrats to FreeDOS for 30 years.
This is perhaps a good example of a project being more than the product. By which I mean, we don't really need it - it serves no practical purpose, and yet it continues.
Of course I generalise, but the original premise ("I liked the command line") is amply served by Linux, Mac or Windows. The other original motivations are similarly obsolete now.
All of which is irrelevant. It remains an active project "just because" and isn't that the purest form of Free Software? Sure it's "useless" but we make it because we can, and because we want to.
Perhaps that's the biggest Open Source Community lesson of all- build something that the community enjoys making, unburdened by a large userbase, unburdened by popularity, or usefulness. It's gathered like-minded people who enjoy the journey more than the destination.
So tip of the hat to you all. FreeDOS is an example of capturing the heart of programming - code that doesn't need a reason beyond "because we wanted to."
> we don't really need it - it serves no practical purpose
FreeDOS is used by PC OEMs for tech support, e.g. https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_9586495-9586656-16
FreeDOS helps sell PC hardware without the expense of a Windows license, for customers who would like to install Linux, OpenBSD, or separately licensed Windows, e.g. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02628224.pdfThe "helping sell hardware without Windows" part is actually more like "helps PC vendors exploit a legal loophole and Microsoft keep its market share". They could just as easily install Ubuntu/whatever on computers that don't ship with Windows, but that might make some people stick with it and immediately install Windows on it. But if they put a useless OS like FreeDOS on there, they can check the "has OS" box, as well as the "no bundled license" box, without any risk to Microsoft's market dominance.
Hell, I think HP actually did put Linux on some of their laptops, but just as a compatibility layer to run FreeDOS, since they couldn't get it to work directly. This was clearly done for Microsoft's benefit and nobody else's - don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
“If it weren’t for _, it would surely be the year of Linux on the desktop” is not a new cry, but I don’t think I’ve seen FreeDOS used as the culprit before. Funny stuff.
I don't think this practice is in Microsoft's interest. People who buy a PC with FreeDOS usually install a pirated copy of Windows (or Linux, but not sure what the exact proportion of those is), which definitely doesn't contribute to M$'s bottom line...
Microsoft would far prefer you installing a pirated copy of windows to installing Linux.
Only WinDev, Azure, Office, XBox business units couldn't care less, they get their share of the pie, regardless.
Windows development currently sucks, versus Balmer era, and is full of Web developers for a reason.
Microsoft is the reason why this practice exists in the first place. Their Windows distribution contracts with OEMs say that all computers that an OEM ships must be preloaded with an OS (likely for the piracy issue you mention). Shipping FreeDOS allows OEMs to sell computers to people who don't want to pay for Windows licenses while also not having to provide support for Linux (or some other alternative OS).
On the contrary, being the primary desktop OS that everyone uses and thus everyone supports is Windows' biggest advantage. Anything that helps thingns stays that way contributes to Microsofts bottom line.
The get the money back via Azure Cloud OS (> 60% workloads on Linux), Microsoft 365 subscriptions and XBox.
They monetize your data.
Dell has been selling laptops with Linux for years. A few of the others have too.
Linux took a while to become supported on specific Dell models, https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ubuntu-linux-snuck-into-hi...
> Barton recalled O'Grady suggesting it would be great for developers "if you took one of your laptops, put Ubuntu on it, and just got it to work. We said that's an awesome idea, but it'll never happen, because we're talking about Dell. Our laptops need to deliver huge volumes and revenue. When I talked to one of our higher-ups about the volumes that we thought we would sell, he said, 'Yeah, that's what we sell in Belgium on Tuesday, between three and four in the afternoon.' Despite this disheartening evaluation, when Dell started an in-house innovation fund, Barton pitched it again. This time, he was granted $40,000 to pursue the idea.
What's the functional difference between FreeDOS and some executables "for testing and troubleshooting any component" versus UEFI binaries for the same?
UEFI is roughly a modernized subset of DOS in firmware, with saner calling conventions.
A few decades of maturity, testing and network effects.
As I pointed out the "uselessness" is a generalization, although perhaps your suggestion of use cases rather proves my point.
Firstly "selling pcs without Windows". If you want to sell a machine without windows feel free to ship it with Linux or indeed nothing. Yes, FreeDOS is an option, but it's not unique.
Sure, some techs find it useful as a bare-metal hardware diagnostic tool. Presenting that micro niche as a use case kinda proves the point. (I'm not sure how FreeDOS fares with supporting new hardware but I'll assume it does. My experience with BSD doesn't make me over-optimistic though.)
But I think you missed my point. The main utility of FreeDOS is FreeDOS. It doesn't need to be more than that.
> feel free to ship it with Linux
That requires the OEM to support Linux on the device. This has only been done for select devices, e.g. Dell XPS, and was a major undertaking.
> Presenting that micro niche as a use case kinda proves the point
Everything is a niche until you need it, e.g. installing a BIOS update from FreeDOS USB drive, without needing an OEM-certified Linux or Windows install for firmware distribution.
I don't think examples of FreeDOS being useful 'prove [your] point' about FreeDOS being useless. I think the word 'useless' is an overstatement that's very easy to quibble over, and which therefore gets in the way of you getting your overall point across.
I think your overall point, ars gratia artis, is correct. People have a proclivity for trying to quantify the 'success' of OSS projects by virtue of user counts, use cases, etc, and yet all such measures are totally irrelevant for a non-profit project. There could be a single maintainer and a single user, and so long as they're both happy, the project is a success.
I think FreeDOS shows why worrying about something being "useless" isn't so productive: it probably seemed somewhat "useless" at the time, but ended up being more useful to more people, and for a much longer time, than initially predicted. Did anyone predict that it would be so useful, decades later, for the tech-support use-cases it enjoys now?
Funnily enough the Permacomputing folks call out the use of Freedos as a form of Bedrock platform.
https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/
That freedos will run on almost any x86 PC built in the last 43 years it a testament to software that truly transcends obsolescence.
Just because it isn't the latest and greatest doesn't mean it doesn't have use.
There are many thousands of DOS programs still in active use today -- and not just by hobbyists or for educational purposes, in active commercial use, if you require economically productive criteria to consider something practical: Many industrial control systems still used every day operate through DOS applications written in the 1980s.
Spending a lot of time and money on a complete rewrite upgrade to make these control systems to use some other OS 'just because' would serve no practical purpose. They work fine on DOS. It would be expensive and risky to change that.
At the same time, MS-DOS has been unmaintained for decades. FreeDOS is almost entirely compatible with MS-DOS applications, and is still actively maintained with bugfixes and so on.
FreeDOS sounds like a very practical option indeed.
If the control systems have hard real-time requirements, FreeDOS may be one of the few options. (At least I assume FreeDOS is, since MS-DOS was.) Presumably it's a lot cheaper than QNX, too.
> It remains an active project "just because"
Does it? FreeDOS is very useful as a DOS to run in DOSBox or dosemu to run DOS programs, including old games.
FreeDOS has a benefit: in case you do not need or want a more complicated operating system than DOS. Another benefit is in case your intention is to run DOS programs on the computer.
FreeDOS is pretty useful if you happen to need it.
Back in the day my go-to method for making DOS boot disks was to find a win9x machine and type "format /s". That used to be easy to do, but there are no more abundant Win9x machines anymore. FreeDOS was an alternative to that.
The last time I used FreeDOS was a few years ago to flash a bios update that required DOS to do so.
I still need to use it to update certain firmwares
FreeDOS can be used for offline word processing, e.g. reducing information leaks when writing the next "Game of Thrones".
(2014) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b...
> Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.. WordStar, George R.R. Martin's favorite word processor, also runs happily in FreeDOS.
I've installed Asahi on my Mac and so far have been happily computing with the following
What I like about these is how consistent it is. No sneaky updates that shuffle things around (I don't mind learning new stuff, but I don't like to have my workflows break for no sensible reason). If WordStar was everything I needed, I wouldn't want Office 365 either.My personal software setup is almost identical :D. The only differences are: I use EMMS in Emacs for music, pdf-tools in Emacs for PDFs, and I also use mpv for remote videos (with pipe-viewer for YouTube).
I have spent more than a decade now working to GPL-ize as much of my stack as possible, carefully evaluating and picking my tools, and what you touch on is huge: a consistent, reliable, small footprint stack that is easily auditable is a bigger deal than people realize.
"Maintain a Website" - this really means "publish" (your works)
Because even if you do tons of very good work - if you don't publish it, then it's as if you're doing nothing.
This is where a lot of non-profits fail.
A lot of them are doing very, very good work - but because they suck at documentation & publication ; then people doesn't know about it at all.
Extremely anodyne — given that the author has maintained FreeDOS for longer than I've been alive, I was hoping for slightly more interesting ideas than "have a website and be nice to people." Not that I disagree with his advice!
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nostalgia. Many FOSS projects feed on collective or obsessive nostalgia. I should know having contributed to some and following many. DOS is also sister project to retro gaming, a deep well for those fuzzy feelings.
That said, Hall does offer good and sensible advice to keep the community together and civil.
It is astounding just how much gets done via nostalgia, especially in the gaming space. Just look at the emulation scene to see the best of this.
I think it is better to summarize the article with: open and positive communication is at the core of collaborative open source software. While the message may seem trite, it is also a message that many open source developers need to hear.
Great ideas are often simple, the main problem is that people consider them too simple, neglect them and then fail.
You'd be surprised how many widely used open source projects still fail one or both of those conditions.
> I was hoping for slightly more interesting ideas
Sometimes there's a lot of value in reiterating core concepts.
Maybe doubly so if they're validated by his long experience in the OSS world.
Sure, but building a community is not easy and it’s good to reinforce that there are no shortcuts.
I think I would pretty a suspicious of a blog akin to “Linus Torvlads wants this website banned - build an enthusiastic and productive OSS community in just one week with this one neat trick.”
Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?
> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists
I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?
One prominent example, Rust started off with mailing lists but shut them off a decade ago or so. Many other projects I participate in or follow have moved their communication to other means, Discord and Discourse are popular, sometimes the mailing lists remain but are silent, sometimes they are removed.
Both Discourse and Discord seem entirely inappropriate for FOSS projects -- they are both proprietary walled-garden SaaS applications that aren't themselves consistent with FOSS principles, and they are both exclusively web-based with close coupling between the UI and the underlying functionality, which makes it difficult or impossible for users to access, log, and archive messages with tools most optimal for their own workflow.
FOSS projects should communicate over open protocols with a variety of interoperable implementations -- whether with tried and true tools like NNTP, mailing lists, and IRC, or more novel solutions like Matrix -- instead of allowing a proprietary third-party web application to present a one-size-fits-all interface and function as a single point of failure for project coordination.
Discord is definitely inappropriate, but Discourse is open source and has an API for anyone's custom use, including stuff like RSS feeds. I've been dealing with email since the 80's, and I'm quite familiar with the power of email clients, but for any given project I'd much rather use Discourse. While email clients have message organization down pat, the UI for content itself is retrograde, and email deliverability is a complete crapshoot and getting worse every year. On a web forum, when you see your post, you can be pretty sure everyone else will see that post too.
You can shake your fist against the tide as much as you want, but a lot of projects are populated entirely from people who grew up after the web was born, and their members see no need to keep looking back to a system designed for a world before TCP/IP itself.
You're trying to make this into an old vs. new argument, but I'm just looking at good vs. bad. Discourse being self-hostable FOSS certainly ameliorates that part of my criticism, but it still suffers from being a web-only application with close coupling between functionality and presentation, and contrary to your complaint about "retrograde" UIs, I find Discourse's interface to be quite slow and disorganized, and offers a "narrow" view of discussion, in contrast to more mature UIs' "broad" view.
"Message organization" is one of the most significant elements of this particular use case. Maintaining well-organized archives is extremely important, and it's not enough for messages merely to be searchable -- they should be easily browseable by topic and time range.
Does Discourse have searchable history?
Discord is out not because it's proprietary, but because it doesn't have usable history. They could be GPL and they'd still be bad.
Of course Discourse is searchable, it wouldn't be much of a discussion board if it wasn't. Many Discourse-based fora I've been on even do a live search as you type the subject of a post, something that turns out really handy for community support boards.
Discord's lack of searchability is certainly a biggie, but having all history locked away and unexportable in any way is the worst part of it.
And damn the two similar names are confusing, I find myself typing one when I meant the other...
Ah so Discourse is ... a forum software? Got it :)
Several projects I'm interested in have gone to Discourse. I don't mind the Web interface but the infantile notifications I receive and the nonsense the application sticks into a thread are annoying at best and add nothing to the usefulness of the forum. It otherwise detracts from what should be technical discussions.
Another annoyance are projects that choose to autolock threads in Discourse. On a technical forum such actions are unwarranted as there are times when an investigation can take months and remembering to add a nonsense post to keep a thread from autolocking doesn't always happen. So, a collection of disjoined threads result and even with links to the prior thread(s) the flow of investigation is greatly disrupted. SMH
I think we should establish a term for “FOSS and contributing to the project or getting support does not require using proprietary software”. Strongly FOSS?
I've contributed to two, and neither used mailing lists. One lived in discord, the other handled comms via github issues and project contributor messaging.
Unfortunately, many newer open source projects tend to prefer Discord or other closed plantforms for their primary communication channels.
Out of the top of my limited experience the only project I interacted with not on GitHub or similar is Linux.
I personally avoid using email entirely when possible. The amount of spam has made it almost totally useless to me
Yes, CPython moved to Discourse and then censored the mailing lists, which are now defunct. Discourse offers superior tracking and censoring abilities, so only those who have the right opinions and work for the right corporations can be heard.
The fact that there is little real progress can be suppressed.
I can't speak to running a mailing list but guaranteeing delivery to everyone is already a hard task with just one user. Primary difficulty will be getting an IP in a "clean" subnet - the IP that comes with a cheapo VPS will have random neighbors that you can't control and who might get the whole /24 onto blacklists again and again. If you are ok with writing off e.g. Microsoft (hosted Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) or whoever gives you trouble then that makes things easier. This is fine for personal mail depending on what your friends use but with a public service you are going to run into users with problems receiving mail from a random VPS.
SourceHut has built-in support for mailing lists.
https://lists.sr.ht/
The one I have seen the most is Mailman.
https://list.org/
There's a whole bunch of ways to run a project. Some of them don't really involve "running a project" in the first place and are just the work of one person. Others have very different social dynamics than FreeDOS. If you want to be an asshole to everyone you perceive to be an idiot, then ... you can do that. You're allowed. I'm not saying it's the kind of project I'm very likely to contribute to, but not everything needs to suit my preferences.
Besides, many social conventions "exclude" people. I was once reprimanded for using the phrase "getting shit done" because any profanity, no matter the context, is forbidden, apparently. I felt that was childish and infantile enough that I didn't really feel like being part of that.
In the end all that's needed is publishing the code. You don't need to care about community or anything. You can, but don't need to.
>Besides, many social conventions "exclude" people.
All social conventions exclude people. There's no way to be inclusive of everyone. For an extreme example, if you allow Nazi ideology in a place, for instance, that excludes people who won't put up with that or who the Nazis chase away. But if you disallow Nazi ideology, then you're excluding Nazis. Of course, this will devolve into Popper's paradox of tolerance, but the point is, you can't please everyone. Someone's always going to be excluded by whatever social conventions you put in place. You just have to decide which groups of people you're willing to exclude.
A less controversial example than nazis (sigh) might be requiring basic hygiene.
If you don't exclude people who don't exhibit basic hygiene (e.g. smelling like literal shit), then a whole lot of casuals will be driven away. If you do exclude them, you exclude them.
Now, you might say, "what exactly is the difference between nazis and some people who smell like actual shit? you just swapped some words out", but, you see,
>A less controversial example than nazis (sigh) might be requiring basic hygiene.
I'm not sure why Nazis are "controversial". They're generally the universal boogeymen. Although these days, it does seem like some Nazi ideology has become more popular in some places in recent years...
When we test software, one thing we normally do is look for edge cases, and test those. If the program works with the edge cases, then it can handle any cases. So picking Nazis for my extreme example is just my use of an edge case to illustrate my point about the limits of inclusivity, and also points to Popper's paradox of tolerance, since the Nazis were the poster-child for intolerance.
But yeah, for a workplace setting, for instance, excluding people lacking basic hygiene (smelling like shit) is a good example. I've actually had problems like this at work, unfortunately (with coworkers smelling like this, not me!).
> They're generally the universal boogeymen.
That's the problem actually. It's so strong that it makes it more difficult for the principle to be applied for what is less strong. Also in some place it has also been overused to the point it's not effective because you don't know if the people accused are really nazi or not (in my country even left politicians may be called literal fascists by others at the left)
The percentage of people who are called Nazis who are actually them is probably higher than you realize, because the word "Nazi" makes people think of concentration camps, and we don't see those, even though the Nazis did over a decade of other bad stuff before that. A Nazi accusation isn't saying someone runs a concentration camp - it's saying when there are concentration camps, they probably will.
In short, the problem with using Nazi's as a comparison is the strong emotional reactions people are prone to experience. (Justifiably so to be clear)
When a person invokes the Nazi's while discussing subjects that aren't nearly as heavy (emotionally speaking) the horrors of everything Nazi related, they're leave themselves open to being perceived as hyperbolic. No matter how strongly one might feel about open source, the subject matter is just simply on a different emotional level than all the horror which is Nazi. (and therefore, ought not to used as a comparison)
And again just to be clear, I'm not accusing you of being hyperbolic personally, I just want to elaborate on why some people groan when they see Nazi's beings inserted into topics which they have nothing to do with.
FreeDOS is something that seems useful in manufacturing of PC's and PC-like embedded stuff.
Like as a platform for running basic diagnostics and whatever not.