INTERVIEW WITH INTERFACE MAGAZINE I was recently interviewed for an upcoming article in Interface Magazine, a Japanese technology publication. I thought others might be interested in my comments, as they relate to the beginnings of FreeDOS. >> I want to ask you some questions about FreeDOS. Would you like please tell me? I will write column about FreeDOS from your answer. Certainly! But before I begin, let me give you a little background on FreeDOS: I started the FreeDOS Project when I was a senior in college, attending the University of Wisconsin (USA). My major was physics, but I had quite a diverse background with computers and operating systems, although I had never before taken on a project the size that FreeDOS has become. It occurred to me that MS-DOS just wasn't very well designed. There were things you just couldn't do under DOS that you could do with, say, a UNIX system. I guess my biggest complaint was that there weren't very many utilities shipped with MS-DOS, and there weren't very many command line options to the utilities that were already part of MS-DOS. With the little bit of experience that I had (at the time) with the C programming language, I began re-writing some of the basic DOS utilities such as MORE, TYPE, and ECHO. The utilities I was writing were backwards-compatible with MS-DOS (that is, they supported all the functionality of the MS-DOS utilities) but contained extensions that made the programs more useful to me. It was about this time that I started noticing some articles on USENET News that said, "is there a free DOS that I can download for my PC?" You have to remember, this was about the time that Linux (a free UNIX) was becoming popular with students. DOS was the next step, I suppose. There was no free DOS available at the time. I released my utilities under the GNU GPL (a free software license, which you can find on www.gnu.org), found other free utilities that could replace MS-DOS programs, and began to gather support for a free DOS. One of the projects I ran across was the Linux DOSEmu Project. DOSEmu produces a PC environment under Linux that will support MS-DOS (or any other DOS). Most people were using this to run WordPerfect for DOS, since no word processor was (yet) available for Linux. At about that time, the DOSEmu folks had been contacted by Pat Villani (patv@iop.com) who had written a DOS kernel (DOS/NT, now "DOS-C") for embedded systems. DOSEmu put me in touch with Pat. Around July, 1994, I announced that I had started a free DOS project, called "PD-DOS." By October, I realized that most of the stuff I had collected was not actually "public domain" but was GNU GPL or just "freeware". So by October, 1994, I changed the name to Free-DOS (the hyphen was later dropped, to become "FreeDOS"). The rest, as they say, is history! :) >> Q1 Is this possible that Embedded system engineers use FreeDOS as embedded OS for their commercial products? The FreeDOS kernel was originally written as an embedded DOS, but there is a fine point here. As long as there is a clear distinction about what the customer is actually paying for, then I don't see anything that would prevent an embedded system engineer from using the FreeDOS kernel as an embedded DOS. However, for the "best" answer, I suggest you talk to Pat Villani himself. The FreeDOS Kernel is distributed under the GNU GPL. That means that the software is free, and that anyone may have a copy. The source must also be made available, so that anyone may get it and look at it. (The GNU GPL also covers other aspects of the code, but I will not cover them here.) The fine point with embedded systems is letting the embedded system customer know that the (commercial) system is running on the FreeDOS kernel. The customer must be allowed to download or otherwise obtain the source to the FreeDOS Kernel, if the customer so desires. That is the nature of the GNU GPL. I am not a lawyer, so you may want to have your legal counsel look at the GNU GPL, and give you a legal opinion. >> Q2 Please tell me release schedule or release plan of FreeDOS. I can't speak for the FreeDOS Kernel in any detail (for that, you should contact Pat Villani) but I can mention the FreeDOS Project's general goals: We intend to write a free replacement for MS-DOS. Therefore, our first goal is to achieve MS-DOS compatibility. We have chosen to become compatible with MS-DOS 3.3, because it is our opinion that MS-DOS 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x are really just improvements upon MS-DOS 3.3. Expanded memory support was improved, and some other things fixed, but on the whole the underlying DOS kernel didn't change that much. The FreeDOS Project is very close to meeting that goal. As for some of the projects that I maintain: * My original utilities already meet the MS-DOS spec. However, I am currently improving the programs, and doing some code cleanup. So I plan to release version 2.0 of those utilities very soon. After 2.0, I don't expect the utilities will change much over time. * I also maintain the FreeDOS Install program, which does have a project plan. Basically, these are the features that have been planned: o 1.0 - A working model of the Install program. Supports installing from floppy disk or CD-ROM. (Versions 1.1, 1.2, and 1.2.1 provided fixes for the software, or made it easier to use.) Version 1.0 was released 28 November, 1997. o 2.0 - Will add support for zip files, so you don't need to rely on an external UNZIP program to extract packages. This will also allow the Install program to be run from a boot disk. I am almost ready to release version 2.0. o 3.0 - Will add a nicer user interface, so the program will be easier to use. o 4.0 - Will add support for package management, such as package dependencies. This will make it easier to provide software updates and fixes. >> Q3 Please tell me how to join FreeDOS project. Do you welcome that Japanese engineers or programmers join this project? Anyone who wants to join the FreeDOS Project should first read the FreeDOS Maintainers Lists. This lists the software that has already been written for the FreeDOS Project. Looking at this list first will help prevent duplicated effort - why write another version of TYPE, for example, when a version already exists that does the job nicely? People who are interested in writing programs for FreeDOS may be interested in subscribing to the FreeDOS Developer mailing list, "fd-dev". You can join this by visiting the link on www.freedos.org. The mailing list is where most of the discussion about FreeDOS happens these days. Programmers talk about their ideas here. We get a chance to review new changes, new libraries, new programs, and everyone has the opportunity to suggest improvements. For example, I have gotten a lot of good feedback from the mailing list when adding package info file support to the FreeDOS Install Program. But you don't have to be able to write programs to contribute to the FreeDOS Project. There are many things that still need to done, which don't require programming experience. For example, I would like to see someone create some web page banners that advertise FreeDOS. Help is also needed with the FreeDOS Documentation Project. Neither of these two examples involves writing programs. There is a list of suggestions for people who are interested in getting involved with FreeDOS. This list is available at www.isd.net/jhall1/freedos >> Q4 Do you want somedoby to custmize FreeDOS to Japanese environment? I am currently writing a language library for FreeDOS, similar to the UNIX language catalog system. This library will first be used to add foreign language support to the FreeDOS Install program (will probably be added in version 2.1 or 3.0) but later this will be in a form that can be used in other programs. So yes, I would like help in customizing FreeDOS to the Japanese environment. I would like to do this through the language catalog, if at all possible. If there are any Japanese programmers who have experience with this, and who would like to help me, I would be glad for the help! My email address is jhall1. Thanks for your time. Jim