Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes The developer of Free95 says it will be a free Windows 95-compatible OS, but we suspect an elaborate prank. At best, maybe an unknowing one. The project description of Versoft's Free95 says that "Free95 is an open source Windows-compatible operating system." Well, not yet it's not. It appears to be barely even a sketch of a …
> Or contribute to ReactOS.
Exactly so.
How about people use these amazing "AI" coding assistants to demonstrate cleaning up the codebase of some significant old project? All of Symbian is on Github, for instance.
If those LLM bot tools can do half of what their evangelists claim they can, maybe IBM could open source Workplace OS/2 -- Microsoft had zero direct input into that one -- and there could be a FOSS OS/2 clone.
OSfree never got anywhere:
https://www.osfree.org/
Just like FreeVMS although that got _slightly_ further.
https://www.pvv.org/~roart/freevms.html
Other than the needed removal of the all the proprietary software and proprietary software loading machinery (fixed by GNU Linux-libre), what is there to fix in the kernel, Linux?
Its scheduler is pretty good and it has plenty of drivers and no other kernel is functionally as good.
More improvements to GNU packages, or new GNU packages, or improvements to other free software would be beneficial and would indeed be easier than writing a bug-for-bug compatible windows 95 clone.
> what is there to fix in the kernel, Linux
Can I introduce you to the idea that there are other ways to _do computers_ than Unix? And that some of us, after a third of a century of using and supporting and documenting and describing Unix, _still do not like it?_
Your comment reminds me of the Blues Brothers:
“We got both kinds. We got country AND Western!”
What if -- brace yourself, but suffering is part of growth, pain is part of learning -- what if _someone does not like Country and Western?_
> Hey; remember Windows 95 in a web browser?
Yeah, but that was the entire real thing, in an emulator, wasn't it?
As opposed to crazy websites like this:
https://dustinbrett.com/
Which AFAICT is a humongous lump of Javascript pretending to be a desktop OS inside a browser tab. Seems totally pointless to me, but what do I know?
<cough> second...</cough>
The first was a few years earlier, it was all a bit hush hush though....
ENIAC had design ideas from the ABC computer. The ABC wasn't general purpose, but John Mauchly of ENIAC looked at the design of the ABC. And that was used to invalidate the patent for ENIAC.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff–Berry_computer
Do look for the part about the memory it used, "regenerative capacitor memory". A rotating drum of capacitors used to store numbers. In high school, I may have seen one from the original ABC regenerative capacitor memory drums while I was visiting ISU. It was one of the few parts still existing from the original ABC.
I think they have made a reproduction of the whole ABC since then.
Implementation of PutChar before somebody on Reddit very slowly explained the idea of testing ranges of values:
```
UINT32 index;
if (ch == ' ')
{
index = 26 * 16;
}
else if (ch == '!')
{
index = 27 * 16;
}
else if ... etc for another 42 if statements ...
```
Author's excuse: "Be aware that i wrote this code while i was multitasking and i am terrible at multitasking. Thanks for the idea, and i will surely rewrite that portion of the code."
No matter what his potential, right now this seems to be an enthusiastic child running fast towards the buffers.
Why even bother making such a thing?
Novelty is cool, but Win 95 never had solid utility. I was a bridgehead, so speak, for M$.
NT was the real play back then and 95 was just a way to get the average person familiar with the new GUI and general NT workflow.
So, I'll pass just on general principle, thank you very much.
I cannot speak for the original author, and think we might be grossly overestimating him if we assume any coherent rationale, but the objective of recreating a Windows 95-compatible version of Win32 would allow a lot more in terms of era-relevant entertainment content.
Windows 95's 'incomplete' runtime fault detection acts as accidental fault tolerance for many titles — in Windows 95 passing a NULL here or there to DirectX gets a free ride whereas under NT you'd get the page fault that one would ideally hope for.
Nearly all games of the Win95 era were MS-DOS games, and for that we have FreeDOS.
For the few games or other programs requiring Windows 95, why not just run actual Windows 95? Why re-implement it? Nobody is going to be breaking down your door for dowloading a copy.
FreeDOS had some legitimate utility as many firmware upgrade programs and similar still ran under DOS when it was developed, and they indeed shipped them together with FreeDOS for several years. But who, today, has a big market for a product that needs to run on Windows 95? Who hasn't ported to newer platforms or gotten things working under emulation or other compatibility layers?.
Windows 95 was just reskinned Windows for Workgroups, which was mostly a GUI layer on top of DOS with a hodgepodge of 16- and 32-bit components. Fair play to Microsoft, having 32-bit components in that strain of Windows was an innovation, but the world has moved on quite substantially, and the Windows 9x lineage died with Windows Me.
Yup I saw the pic with like an empty box and an about box and figured 'that'll take a while to get feature complete.' lol
Best of luck to them. But given the complexity of Win95, the already rather ugly design (16-bit DOS shell with 32 bit things tacked on), and the amount of 'we didn't quite follow the documented API' programs did back then... well best of luck.
I looked at this too and concluded it's not even a barely working prototype. It's basically just something slapped together to look like Win95 mostly by using the familiar Windows 95 color theme. I wouldn't even call it an operating system.
The author is probably trying to make a name for himself to get a well-paying job or a U.S. H1B visa.
...much of the Tech "press" these days is little more than PR mouth pieces. Gone are the days where many of the tech journalists would dare criticise and scrutinise what was released. Now it's just pretty much "Take press release, swap words around, publish".
Actually it's a little unfair to call the journalists out (although many are NOT journalists), it's more a problem with editorial slop shops, to scared to upset people.
The are a few left, The Reg (although some articles are just PR slop), 404 Media, Aftermath and ARS Technica.
So it's no suprise that some are praising it, as they are just to lazy / incompetent/ corrupt to check the facts.
The copy of the GPLv3 in the LICENSE file is just to look nice.
The makefile under (free95/makefile) says "# Licensed under GNU GPL 3.0", but that's arguably an invalid license header, as it doesn't say if the license is GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-later and it doesn't list the copyright holder or the copyright year.
All other files have no license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NoLicense) meaning it is not "open source" (https://opensource.org/osd), it is source-available, proprietary software.
Interesting recent addition to the repository
Just in case it is rage-deleted like the dllme.txt file, a full quote:
With all respect:
To The Register:
You all can go fuck yourselves, >:)
Have no life? well join The Register to hate on fucking everything!
Professional hating community? Accusing Free95 of being a prank? Yes!
Retarded fuckers :D!
Respectfully, A developer.
I'd be interested too, last time I looked Odin hadn't moved on noticeably from the 90s, and it was hardly great then. There is a changelog, which seems to indicate a flurry of activity around 2004, a bit more in 2011, and then bits until 2017 where it's remained since.
I can't believe it's in any way competitive to WINE. I've run WINE under both FreeBSD and Linux and there is an order of magnitude improvement running WINE under Linux over FreeBSD, let alone comparing to Odin.
Arca Noae do good work with ArcaOS, but it still feels like what it is : a 90s operating system that can run on modern systems, with a number of modern conveniences. Still, it looks like the Dooble web browser is staying very up to date, if still in beta, and OpenOffice (2018 release) is available, could be worse.
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