14 Years & Kicking: FreeDOS Is Still Alive
In writing yesterday about Automake looking to drop MS-DOS and Windows 95/98/ME support, some Phoronix readers were quick to comment that dropping MS-DOS support would also be bad news for FreeDOS.
The last time that FreeDOS came to my mind was nearly one year ago when writing about the release of FreeDOS 1.1. With not having heard much out of the FreeDOS camp in about a year, I was curious to see where they're at today.
When looking at the FreeDOS SVN repository on SourceForge, the operating system hasn't seen much activity since its 1.1 release at the beginning of January. FreeDOS though isn't known to be developed at a expedited pace seeing as FreeDOS 1.0 came six years ago and the project was originally conceived back in 1994 while the initial release happened in 1998.
When looking at the freedos-devel list, there's much more to see from 2012. The mailing list messages range from people asking how they can contribute, announcements of new utilities for FreeDOS, to people asking questions like if the Btrfs file-system can come to FreeDOS.
There does also continue to be new announcements on the site in the form of notable programs/utilities for FreeDOS being released/updated. Some of the recent announcements on the FreeDOS web-site include updates to JWasm and JWlink (forks of OpenWatcom's assembler and linker), a new Blocek editor (an international text editor), DOSLFN, FDNPKG (the FreeDOS Network Packager), and Regina (an ANSI Rexx interpreter). Those new FreeDOS program updates all came in the past two months.
So while it's not in your favor to bet on a FreeDOS 1.2 release coming anytime in the near future, the community around this open-source DOS implementation is still very much alive, at least for the time being. Fetch the latest release or find out more information at FreeDOS.org.
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