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What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

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Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#41

Post by account42 »

elric wrote: post #28
codazoda wrote: post #14

Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?

> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?

Unfortunately, many newer open source projects tend to prefer Discord or other closed plantforms for their primary communication channels.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#42

Post by shortrounddev2 »

elric wrote: post #28
codazoda wrote: post #14

Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?

> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?

I personally avoid using email entirely when possible. The amount of spam has made it almost totally useless to me

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#43

Post by account42 »

codazoda wrote: post #14

Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?

I can't speak to running a mailing list but guaranteeing delivery to everyone is already a hard task with just one user. Primary difficulty will be getting an IP in a "clean" subnet - the IP that comes with a cheapo VPS will have random neighbors that you can't control and who might get the whole /24 onto blacklists again and again. If you are ok with writing off e.g. Microsoft (hosted Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) or whoever gives you trouble then that makes things easier. This is fine for personal mail depending on what your friends use but with a public service you are going to run into users with problems receiving mail from a random VPS.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#44

Post by emmanone »

peter_l_downs wrote: post #3

Extremely anodyne — given that the author has maintained FreeDOS for longer than I've been alive, I was hoping for slightly more interesting ideas than "have a website and be nice to people." Not that I disagree with his advice!

Great ideas are often simple, the main problem is that people consider them too simple, neglect them and then fail.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#45

Post by jowea »

elric wrote: post #28
codazoda wrote: post #14

Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?

> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?

Out of the top of my limited experience the only project I interacted with not on GitHub or similar is Linux.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#46

Post by immibis »

poulpy123 wrote: post #38
shiroiushi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A less controversial example than nazis (sigh) might be requiring basic hygiene. I'm not sure why Nazis are "controversial". They're generally the universal boogeymen. Although these days, it does seem like some Nazi ideology has become more popular in some places in recent years... When we test software, one thing we normally do is look for edge cases, and test those. If the program works with the edge cases, then…

> They're generally the universal boogeymen. That's the problem actually. It's so strong that it makes it more difficult for the principle to be applied for what is less strong. Also in some place it has also been overused to the point it's not effective because you don't know if the people accused are really nazi or not (in my country even left politicians may be called literal fascists by others at the left)

The percentage of people who are called Nazis who are actually them is probably higher than you realize, because the word "Nazi" makes people think of concentration camps, and we don't see those, even though the Nazis did over a decade of other bad stuff before that. A Nazi accusation isn't saying someone runs a concentration camp - it's saying when there are concentration camps, they probably will.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#47

Post by pjlegato »

bruce511 wrote: post #4

Congrats to FreeDOS for 30 years. This is perhaps a good example of a project being more than the product. By which I mean, we don't really need it - it serves no practical purpose, and yet it continues. Of course I generalise, but the original premise ("I liked the command line") is amply served by Linux, Mac or Windows. The other original motivations are similarly obsolete now. All of which is irrelevant. It remain…

There are many thousands of DOS programs still in active use today -- and not just by hobbyists or for educational purposes, in active commercial use, if you require economically productive criteria to consider something practical: Many industrial control systems still used every day operate through DOS applications written in the 1980s.

Spending a lot of time and money on a complete rewrite upgrade to make these control systems to use some other OS 'just because' would serve no practical purpose. They work fine on DOS. It would be expensive and risky to change that.

At the same time, MS-DOS has been unmaintained for decades. FreeDOS is almost entirely compatible with MS-DOS applications, and is still actively maintained with bugfixes and so on.

FreeDOS sounds like a very practical option indeed.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#48

Post by Zambyte »

skydhash wrote: post #16
transpute wrote: post #6

FreeDOS can be used for offline word processing, e.g. reducing information leaks when writing the next "Game of Thrones". (2014) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b... > Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the…

I've installed Asahi on my Mac and so far have been happily computing with the following Emacs Firefox foot (terminal) swaywm (and the associated utilities) KeepassXC (password management) mpd (music) calibre (ebooks) mpv (for the few local videos I still watch on my computer) evince (for pdfs) various cli utilities What I like about these is how consistent it is. No sneaky updates that shuffle things around (I don't…

My personal software setup is almost identical :D. The only differences are: I use EMMS in Emacs for music, pdf-tools in Emacs for PDFs, and I also use mpv for remote videos (with pipe-viewer for YouTube).

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#49

Post by Gormo »

kryptiskt wrote: post #35
elric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?

One prominent example, Rust started off with mailing lists but shut them off a decade ago or so. Many other projects I participate in or follow have moved their communication to other means, Discord and Discourse are popular, sometimes the mailing lists remain but are silent, sometimes they are removed.

Both Discourse and Discord seem entirely inappropriate for FOSS projects -- they are both proprietary walled-garden SaaS applications that aren't themselves consistent with FOSS principles, and they are both exclusively web-based with close coupling between the UI and the underlying functionality, which makes it difficult or impossible for users to access, log, and archive messages with tools most optimal for their own workflow.

FOSS projects should communicate over open protocols with a variety of interoperable implementations -- whether with tried and true tools like NNTP, mailing lists, and IRC, or more novel solutions like Matrix -- instead of allowing a proprietary third-party web application to present a one-size-fits-all interface and function as a single point of failure for project coordination.

Re: What I've learned about open source community over 30 years

#50

Post by pjmlp »

rcxdude wrote: post #34
rob74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this practice is in Microsoft's interest. People who buy a PC with FreeDOS usually install a pirated copy of Windows (or Linux, but not sure what the exact proportion of those is), which definitely doesn't contribute to M$'s bottom line...

Microsoft would far prefer you installing a pirated copy of windows to installing Linux.

Only WinDev, Azure, Office, XBox business units couldn't care less, they get their share of the pie, regardless.

Windows development currently sucks, versus Balmer era, and is full of Web developers for a reason.

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