Yes, you're right. The previous source code release of MS-DOS (March 2014, from Microsoft) was under a "look but do not touch" license that said you could only read the source code, but you could not use it elsewhere, and you couldn't apply what you'd learned from the MS-DOS code in other projects. So the FreeDOS Project has been very careful and said several times that if you viewed the MS-DOS source code, you should not contribute to FreeDOS Base because we didn't want to risk tainting the FreeDOS source code. We have a note to that effect on the FreeDOS History page:

"Please note: if you download and study the MS-DOS source code, you should not contribute code to FreeDOS afterwards. We want to avoid any suggestion that FreeDOS has been "tainted" by this proprietary code."

This source code release uses the MIT license (aka Expat license) which is compatible with the GNU GPL. That should mean that people who read this version of the MS-DOS source code can contribute to FreeDOS. (As always, if you've somehow viewed one of the unauthorized source code releases of MS-DOS, you should still not contribute to FreeDOS Base.)

Note: I'm the founder and coordinator of FreeDOS

This is a very interesting update. And interestingly, the MIT license is compatible with the GNU GPL.

You're right, these are very old versions of MS-DOS that do not include more advanced features including CD-ROM support, networking, '386 support, etc. So from a practical side, FreeDOS would not be able to reuse this code for any modern features anyway. But for basic features, such as weird edge case compatibility, we might now be able to reference this code to improve FreeDOS.

Note: I'm the founder and coordinator of FreeDOS

This is a really good question! Should I paint my house red? My neighbor a few houses down painted their house a bright red. It used to be sort of grey, but it's kind of a bright red now. It looks really nice, and updated what had been a "tired"-looking house and turned it into something eye catching, in a good way.

So I'm asking Slashdot: Should I paint my house red?

This is a design decision. Apple decided to include a notch in their new iPhone. Now the phone stands out a bit more against the competition. As smartphone makers generally drifted to the same "glass brick" design (because it makes a lot of sense for what it is) Apple found a new way to identify "that's an iPhone" through a design choice. Now when you see a white smartphone, you can guess what make it is - if it has a notch, it's a new iPhone.

I personally don't like the notch. I use Android, so I haven't used a notch. But I just don't like how it looks. It looks like Apple ran out of room with the phone, and just stuck the camera inside the display.

Maybe some Android phones will copy the notch, just like Android phones started to look more like iPhones in other ways. But I hope they don't.

Also:

Some people prefer one term over the other. I'm curious: all these years later, do you still prefer the term open source software or are you more aligned to Free software?

In my view, Stallman created Free software as an ethical point. He didn't like that companies were selling software without source code. (To be clear, Stallman doesn't mind selling software, because the GPL allows that. Stallman doesn't like software without source code.)

And the term open source software was invented to communicate a way of working together on something. Out of the chaos of the bazaar comes something good.

Do you agree with that?

For anyone looking for a list of radio stations owned by iHeartMedia, you can find it on their website: list of stations. They even have it broken down so you can search by City, State, and Genre.

The article is very short, and the summary is basically the entire article. What's missing from the summary are the screenshots that explain what is meant by "the attacker just needs to sign up." Because when you try to create a new account for most websites, the website will tell you in real time (before clicking Submit) that your username or email address is already taken. So the attacker has an easy way to figure out what accounts on there. Just enter (via a script) a bunch of email addresses and see which ones generate an error that the account is already signed up. Now the attacker has a list of valid usernames/emails.

What should websites do, if "incorrect username or password" is not the right way? The article makes this suggestion at the end:

To prevent attackers from knowing whether an account exists or not your signup must only take an email address and provide no feedback in the UI if the sign up succeeded or not. Instead the user would receive an email saying they’re signed up. The only way an attacker would know if an account exists is if they had access to the target’s email.

So their recommendation is to not provide any feedback when you sign up for an account. Just let the user sign up for a new account (i.e. click Submit) and if the email address doesn't already have an account, then you send them their login details.

I think this will really confuse people who legitimally try to sign up for a service, and don't get any feedback. That confirmation email might take a few minutes to make it to the user's Inbox. Or maybe they won't realize they will get an email confirmation. In the meantime, the user might think the sign-up failed, and attempt to create another account. Granted, only one email will get sent, but the user will be spinning their wheels and getting really agitated for the first few minutes. Not a good way to start a user experience.

I think a better solution is not to notify the new user that the username or email already exists before clicking Submit. Just let them click Submit, then figure out if the account name already exists, and present an error message after Submit. That's not a perfect solution either, but I think it's better than the one suggested in the article.

I thought I'd point out that Tom Baker is also doing ongoing Doctor Who stories with Big Finish Productions. These are entirely on audio (think audiobooks, but with a full cast) and are extremely good! He's done six "seasons" already, and there's a seventh on the way.

These are full cast productions, with original cast members, including Leela (Louise Jameson), Romana I (Mary Tamm), Romana II (Lalla Ward), and K9 (John Leeson). And occasional appearances by other characters, with Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin as Jago and Litefoot (from the classic TV story The Talons of Weng-Chiang) and Geoffrey Beevers as The Master.

It's not just nostalgia. Big Finish does an amazing job! I've been a subscriber and listener for several years now. The audio stories were great when I had a regular weekly three-hour commute, but now I listen to them during a much shorter daily commute to/from work, and during quiet moments on weekends.

Big Finish has the other classic Doctors too, from 4 to 8 (and other actors filling in for 1 to 3 - Frazer Hines as Pat Troughton's 2nd Doctor is spot-on). As others have pointed out, Big Finish has already done a version of Shada with Paul McGann (8th Doctor); Lalla Ward (Romana); and John Leeson (K9).

I would say those are exceptions, and for a reason. Memory managers like QEMM rely on the MS-DOS internal structures, not exclusively API, and the underlying internal structure in FreeDOS is different.

Applications work fine though. Some people have even installed and run Windows on FreeDOS.

The most common example that comes up is when someone discovers old data that they'd like, or that they need, and today's programs don't read them. For example, Microsoft Excel doesn't read WKS files anymore.

I used to work in higher ed, and we had a researcher who uncovered some floppy disks with some old research data. They just had to get at the data in there. I recall it was a niche program, not a spreadsheet or word processing file, and nothing would read the data. So we installed FreeDOS on a machine, loaded the old program, and read the data then exported it into a plain text file.

These things come up from time to time, and it's nice to have FreeDOS around to help you.

Interesting trivia: the FreeDOS Kernel used to run on m68k machines. Pat Villani wrote a DOS-like kernel for m68k that simplified his embedded development at the time. Later, the kernel became Intel-only.

These days, the FreeDOS Kernel can only run on an Intel PC with BIOS.

We had this same discussion in the FreeDOS mailing lists as we decided what the next version after "1.1" should be. Some wanted the new FreeDOS to be 32-bit. I didn't go that far, but for a while I thought we should imagine what "DOS" would look like today if Microsoft hadn't killed MS-DOS when they moved to Windows. And it's an interesting thought experiment.

A modern DOS would have to update its memory model. DOS uses a segmented memory model, which made sense when the PC was a simple computing device. With the Intel 80386 processor, you could have multitasking. That's why Linux was originally written for the '386. So a modern DOS would also support multitasking. At some point, though, this modern DOS will break backwards compatibility with legacy DOS applications. To preserve some method of compatibility, we reasoned, a modern DOS would likely include a sandbox (like DOSEmu) to run these legacy applications.

But when you look at it, we already have that modern DOS. That's Linux. Because Linux supports multitasking, it has a flat memory model, it does all these other things. And if you want to run legacy DOS applications, you boot FreeDOS in a PC emulator like DOSEmu. That's not DOS. FreeDOS is still DOS, and needs to remain DOS. So we agreed the next version after FreeDOS 1.1 would be an update to FreeDOS. That's why this version is FreeDOS 1.2.

People sometimes forget about legacy software, but this pops up in unexpected places. I used to be campus CIO of a small university, and we once had a faculty member bring in some floppy disks with old research data on them. The data wasn't stored in plain text files, but as DOS application data. None of our modern systems would read the old data files, so we booted a spare PC with FreeDOS, downloaded a shareware DOS program that could read the application data, and exported the data to plain text.

For those who don't know, DOS stands for Disk Operating System. DOS was the first PC operating system that really became popular. (CP/M didn't really take off.) Microsoft's MS-DOS was the popular operating system in the 1980s and the early 1990s, until Windows95 in 1995.

I used DOS all the time when I was growing up, and into my college years. In 1994, Microsoft talked about how they were working on the next version of Windows, and that version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. But if you remember Windows 3.11, Windows wasn't great. So I decided that if Microsoft was going to "kill" DOS, we should create our own to replace it. So we created FreeDOS.

You can read more about it on our website, or on Wikipedia.

I know you're joking here, but yes you can run FreeDOS on an older PC. FreeDOS should run on an 8088, but I don't know anyone who actually has a working one these days. A few folks have emailed me as recently as this year to say that they run FreeDOS on a '286. So in fact, the '286 example you gave is possible!

But how you'd install FreeDOS 1.2 on an old computer like this will be interesting. The FreeDOS 1.2 release has a CDROM installer, or a boot floppy + CDROM installer, or a USB fob drive installer. You can't use any of those on a '286 computer. So the three people who have a '286 will probably transfer FreeDOS 1.2 packages to the '286 by copying them to a floppy and unzipping them.

In 2016, we know that most people use FreeDOS in a PC emulator like VMWare or VirtualPC or QEMU. I use it in QEMU. We recommend the CDROM installer for emulators.

We ran a survey a few years ago, and most people use FreeDOS for three things:

1. Playing DOS games

2. Running legacy software

3. Developing embedded systems

That survey is about five years old now. These days, I'd guess 90% of people using FreeDOS are using it for playing DOS games. And of course, those of us who just like to tinker on DOS as a hobby.

I guess we could add a fourth one to that list too. As others have said, a lot of people use FreeDOS to install firmware updates on computers. That's a good use for FreeDOS too!