On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 9:29 PM Bryan Kilgallin <kilgal...@iinet.net.au> wrote: > > What clout does the FreeDOS community have? If our outfit is affiliated > or disaffiliates from FSF, does that make any difference? How is this > going to affect the lot of FSF women? >
FreeDOS may be a small open source project - but remember, we've been around longer than most. FreeDOS got its start in 1994. That's long before Netscape released the source code to Navigator as the open source Mozilla (1998). That's before open source desktops like KDE (1996) and GNOME (1999). And that's before Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice source code as OpenOffice (2000). FreeDOS actually exists before the term "open source" was a thing. And we're older than the Open Source Initiative. The name "open source" came about after Netscape created Mozila. The Open Source Initiative was formed shortly after that, in 1998 or 1999. So yeah, FreeDOS is small, but we have a lot of history as an open source software project. And it's because FreeDOS predates the term "open source" and the Open Source Initiative that so much of our early history was so strongly aligned with the Free Software Foundation (founded 1985). That's actually why it's "FreeDOS" and not "OpenDOS" .. because for 4 or 5 years after we started FreeDOS, there was no "Open Source" model to look to - only "Free Software" as defined by the Free Software Foundation. But as I've said elsewhere: over time, I stopped associating with RMS and the Free Software Foundation. Despite the "Free" in our name, I think FreeDOS is more closely aligned to "open source" these days. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
