'Dead' FreeDOS about to release version 1

THE OPEN source version of MS-DOS, FreeDOS is about to release version 1.0 at the end of the month, despite rumours that the project had died.MO< Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, admitted that the project had slowed down a bit lately, but it was far from moribund.

FreeDOS has been up and running since 1994, when Microsoft announced its upcoming release of Windows 95 along with plans to stop supporting MS-DOS. Hall to wrote some basic utility code, and the FreeDOS project was born.

Hall said that the recent stalling has been caused by personality differences and flame wars and had led to burnout among the project's developers.

Traffic at the old FreeDOS.org site was so low that only a couple of people were even looking at it. Hall decided to point the site to SourceForge's server and posted a joke that the project was dead.

He was surprised when he started getting mail from people wondering why he had killed the project, so he immediately replaced the old page, but word continued to spread that "FreeDOS was dead."

The guerrilla marketing seems to have attracted more interest from developers and Hall is confident he will have version 1.0 out by the end of the month.

More here. µ