What's the point of free DOS?

Twiggy

I have recently became aware of "Free DOS" an operating system that is fully MS-DOS compatible.

This is great, however now that MS-DOS and PC-DOS are abandon wear, and can be obtained for free, what's the point of having a free compatible OS when you can get the real thing for free?

birdy

Free Dos is built with 100% open source code designed to give the nostalgia back to people who grew up on these systems, much like what there is here. It also provides an easy way to obtain a perfectly free uh clone of MS-DOS with out having to think about the *very* touchy subject of abandonware. As the founder of FreeDos said in a recent interview with a linux podcast of which he said that he didn't not believe in abandonware at all. Another reason is that it can be run on newer hardware and it has open source ports of old classic dos games along with developer utils. FreeDos as well brings native Networking support.

But there are a *few* things that MS-DOS can do better than FreeDOS such as installing Windows...

[Deleted User]

According to their website, FreeDOS can be used for MS-DOS based embedded systems as well:

"Many embedded systems run on DOS, although modern systems may instead run on Linux. If you support an older embedded system, you might be running DOS. And FreeDOS can fit in very well."

SomeGuy

There are two large reasons why someone might chose FreeDOS:

First, support. MS-DOS is no longer supported. If a new piece of hardware breaks MS-DOS, you have no way to ask for a fix or an update. FreeDOS, on the other hand, is still maintained and updated. On top of that, FreeDOS is open source, meaning you can make modifications yourself and reduces the risk that it will ever become completely unsupported.

Second, "abandonware" is useless to companies. You may download abandoned products from Winworld for educational purposes and historic preservation. However, this does not grant any kind of license. Businesses require proper licensing, and are frequently audited. In contrast, FreeDOS, in addition to being Free and zero-cost, automatically grants a license for business production use.

Twiggy

SomeGuy wrote:

There are two large reasons why someone might chose FreeDOS:

First, support. MS-DOS is no longer supported. If a new piece of hardware breaks MS-DOS, you have no way to ask for a fix or an update. FreeDOS, on the other hand, is still maintained and updated. On top of that, FreeDOS is open source, meaning you can make modifications yourself and reduces the risk that it will ever become completely unsupported.

Second, "abandonware" is useless to companies. You may download abandoned products from Winworld for educational purposes and historic preservation. However, this does not grant any kind of license. Businesses require proper licensing, and are frequently audited. In contrast, FreeDOS, in addition to being Free and zero-cost, automatically grants a license for business production use.

True, I'm lucky that I'm just a hobbyist and as such I don't need to give a crap about licenses.

Can you expand on what kind of business would need to use any DOS like OS these days, though?

menage

Twiggy wrote:

SomeGuy wrote:

There are two large reasons why someone might chose FreeDOS:

First, support. MS-DOS is no longer supported. If a new piece of hardware breaks MS-DOS, you have no way to ask for a fix or an update. FreeDOS, on the other hand, is still maintained and updated. On top of that, FreeDOS is open source, meaning you can make modifications yourself and reduces the risk that it will ever become completely unsupported.

Second, "abandonware" is useless to companies. You may download abandoned products from Winworld for educational purposes and historic preservation. However, this does not grant any kind of license. Businesses require proper licensing, and are frequently audited. In contrast, FreeDOS, in addition to being Free and zero-cost, automatically grants a license for business production use.

True, I'm lucky that I'm just a hobbyist and as such I don't need to give a crap about licenses.

Can you expand on what kind of business would need to use any DOS like OS these days, though?

Some of the disk repair and cloning tools like Seagate's Seatools were built on a FreeDOS core. Need direct access to modern hardware and single tasking is better when doing tasks that might scramble a hard disk beyond any hope of recovery. The other frequent user of FreeDOS was Dell which for some time shipped PCs with FreeDOS to get around the Windows OEM requirement that systems needed to be shipped with an OS.

For older hardware, there is not much point to FreeDOS for someone with access to MS-DOS. One could play around with modifying the FreeDOS of course. Indeed, a lot of FreeDOS utilities were compiled with a small bug that made it impossible to run on an 808x or 80286, These checked for 32 bit registers despite the rest of the code being 16-bit so they crashed immediately on 16-bit CPUs.

[Deleted User]

A lot of POS/cash register machines in stores in my area still run on something that is most likely MS-DOS. FreeDOS would benefit them.

Tronky

Twiggy wrote:

Can you expand on what kind of business would need to use any DOS like OS these days, though?

Device and peripheral firmware upgrades are still often supplied with a DOS based flasher. I have had a few supplied with FreeDOS. This gets around licensing issues and cuts costs.

calvinb

Nowadays you see less of that with devices that have EFI - you load your EFI executable in the EFI shell or boot menu. (You can even have executables that work both on Windows and EFI for updating.)

EFI looks a lot like a modernized DOS if you squint enough.

buricco

Twiggy wrote:

I have recently became aware of "Free DOS" an operating system that is fully MS-DOS compatible.

This is great, however now that MS-DOS and PC-DOS are abandon wear, and can be obtained for free, what's the point of having a free compatible OS when you can get the real thing for free?

Because technically you can't. Just because a lot of us have the stuff for download on the Internet doesn't mean anything, and "abandonware" is not a legal concept. And some people, let's be honest, want to, or need to, keep on the up and up legally.