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Slashdot: Interviews: For the 25th Birthday of FreeDOS, Ask Its Founder A Question

Interviews: For the 25th Birthday of FreeDOS, Ask Its Founder A Question
Published on June 10, 2019 at 03:54PM
FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft's announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to Computerworld's 2016 interview with FreeDOS's founder and project coordinator, Jim Hall. "I packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," he explains on the FreeDOS web site, "and we found other public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands." But that was back in 1994, when Jim Hall was still a college student. He went on to spend 11 years as a CIO in local government and the public sector, and served a year on the GNOME Foundation's board of directors. Now it's been 25 years, and as a prominent free software advocate, Hall contacted Slashdot to remind us that the FreeDOS Project "will turn 25 years old on June 29, 2019. This is a huge milestone for any open source software project, and especially for an open source DOS project." So in honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, he's agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Leave your questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers. What else has Jim been up to? "I've decided I want to focus on coaching, advising, and mentoring IT Leaders," explains his page on the FreeDOS site. "I am starting an IT Executive Consulting practice, IT Mentor Group LLC, to help IT Leaders with strategic planning and organizational turnarounds. I am really excited for this new opportunity. It's not every day that you start your own business!" Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985... "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo back in 2000, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can." At this URL you can read the questions he was asked by Slashdot users in 2000 -- and the answers he gave, just six years into the FreeDOS project. Then leave your own best questions in the comments below -- one question per comment -- and we'll send them along to Jim to answer for the 25th anniversary of FreeDOS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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