[arachne] Re: [OT] Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration

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From: Rob <robo13@xxxxxxxxxxx>

> Did IBM kill DOS, or Caldera, or anyone else who produced
> DOS systems? They simply quit using it. They're biggest
> customers, business and government and military demanded
> it. Citibank, NASA, and such wanted something more useful,
> stable, robust, and secure. I will give M$ this, they were
> pressured into it. This was the reason for projects like,
> the Monteray project, OS/2 and NT. M$ kept it going though
> in the consumer windo$e systems. If people really want DOS
> to continue, they can do it thru OpenSource systems. Users
> lost interest too. Freedos is out there. A popular Linux
> publication I read provides a DVD with each issue with four
> to eight gigs of software apiece, with several OSs an issue.
> Freedos is frequently included. DOS programs are supposed
> to talk to hardware directly. I realize for some, like
> CDRWs you need a generic driver, but couldn't somebody write
> some OpenSource drivers. Where are all the DOS programmers?
> Why have so many DOS users switched to Linux, BSD, and windo$e?

As I view it, Microsoft stopped developing DOS in favour of Windows
because there was too much competition on the DOS market. Unfortunately,
all that most of the competitors were able to do was clone MS-DOS, so
when MS-DOS was officially declared dead, they realized that the market
for MS-DOS clones was a dead end, and since they lacked the resources to
clone MS Windows, they simply quit. Of course, Linux played a big role
in killing the incentive to continue developing their own OSes because
it is always cheaper to sell something that other people work on for
free than doing the work oneself. As for the DOS programmers, they were
mostly professionals, so they develop what they are paid for, which
nowadays is probably Windows software, though plenty of them may also
have been hired by the Linux distributors when they realized that there
are not enough hobbyist programmers in the world to make Linux
competitive. Most of the DOS users are not programmers themselves, and
while they might have been willing to continue to spend lots of money on
DOS software, they cannot buy what is not being sold. In some ways, DOS
is now in the same situation in which Linux was before companies found
out that one can make money by selling Open Source software. However,
there is one important difference: Linux users had the Netscape browser
at their disposal, which can do everything that one needs to do when
surfing the 'Net, whereas DOS users are forced to use Windows or Linux
browsers to do this, so when the companies check their server logs, they
find out that their web sites have been visited mostly by people who use
Windows or Linux but almost no one who uses DOS, so they conclude that
no one is using DOS and thus there is no need to write DOS software
anymore. Nobody can count OSes in use directly, especially when they
are free software, so it is probably the web browsers in use that are
being counted instead, which is the reason why I think that it is so
important that DOS gets a browser that can access web sites with SSL,
JS, CSS, Flash and what else is now considered the standard by web
masters.

Regards,

Udo

-- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de

-- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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