FreeDOS is, by definition, a re-implementation of DOS. If you read the
specification on the Wiki the kernel targets MS-DOS 3.3 and the
applications target MS-DOS 6.22. There is no need to modernize FreeDOS.
Anything 32 bit would be radically different and thus is a different
project.
IBM and Microsoft did not see a future with DOS and they knew that back
fairly early on. The marketing literature and trade press at the time was
talking about a multitasking version of DOS for the PC AT. OS/2 was the
answer, but OS/2 1.x was horribly botched by requiring it to run on the
80286 processor and by both IBM and MS trying to work together.
Let's talk about the roadmap.
People are free to fork off and make a new project based on FreeDOS. No
problem there. But once you break compatibility with existing
applications, you lose a lot of your potential user base. And as soon as
you go to 32 bits, you lose all of the early hardware.
I think that we have enough to do to make the existing FreeDOS a pleasant
operating system to install and use. And I think a lot of that work is in
user space. We need a better installer. We need more (16 bit)
applications. And I'm sure that some of our existing 16 bit utilities
could use some modernization and freshening too. Look at mTCP as an
example of what can be done to modernize a good class of applications
(networking) and still do it in 16 bit code that does not break anybody.
Or people can go off and work on a new 32 bit variant of DOS in the hopes
that they'll attract more programmers and fresh applications to the new
platform.
The great news is that anybody can go off and do whatever they want to as
this is all a hobbyist effort anyway. But lets stop calling it a
discussion about the FreeDOS roadmap. Once it goes to 32 bits its not
FreeDOS anymore. Copy the code and start again, but lets not confuse the
two projects anymore.
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