back to article 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 …

  1. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

    Remarks file

    If that remarks file is anything to go by, they could set up a swear jar and the project would be self-funding in no time.

  2. LosD
    Coat

    "It is a little premature to be discussing releases and how lightweight this implementation is."

    Nah, I can for sure say that currently it is _very_ lightweight.

  3. Bebu sa Ware
    Windows

    "just freewheeling with an LLM bot"

    The strcat() code in free95/src/string.c

    while (*dest != 0) { *dest = *dest++; }

    wouldn't exactly be disconfirmatory.

    1. that one in the corner Silver badge

      Re: "just freewheeling with an LLM bot"

      Hey, has that LLM been scraping my code?

    2. Ian 55

      Re: "just freewheeling with an LLM bot"

      This is why I starred it - to remind me to look at it every so often for the entertainment value.

  4. Tron Silver badge

    Wouldn't it be easier...

    ...to start from scratch, or just fix Linux so it isn't such a pain in the arse.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

      Or contribute to ReactOS.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

        > 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

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

          What's the old saying?

          "Everyone wants to create, but nobody wants to maintain. There is no glory in maintenance."

          Needless to say, a very large Achilles heel in our modern tech world.

          1. Scotthva5

            Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

            Everyone likes ice cream but no one wants to milk the cow.

            1. phuzz Silver badge
              Joke

              Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

              Except Dave, and honestly, he seems way too excited about milking the cows, we should probably keep him away from them...

    2. GNU Enjoyer
      Angel

      Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

      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.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

        > 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?_

        1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

          Re: Wouldn't it be easier...

          Either make do with the alternatives, or write their own music.

  5. Blackjack Silver badge

    Hey; remember Windows 95 in a web browser?

    [archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox]

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > 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?

      1. d3Xt3r

        My personal favorite is Windows 93: https://www.windows93.net/

        I love how the Defrag program is actually a snake game.

        1. Zolko Silver badge
          Mushroom

          And the Minesweeper always touches a bomb at first click. ALWAYS , even in custom mode with a single bomb

      2. PRR Silver badge

        Fake??

        > a humongous lump of Javascript pretending to be a desktop OS inside a browser tab

        It runs smooth (in FireFox on an old Pentium!) and the file explorer has some slick bits that make Win11 or MacOS look bad. OK it is just a demo but I'd like to see more.

  6. Tubz Silver badge

    Has 2 working functions, Hey BillG3, he has 2 more than you ever wrote and 1 more than Windows 11 and that's for the phone home telemetry.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The first computer (ENIAC) was invented in 1946. That means it took 49 years to write Windows 95. Even if this is real it's not going to finished till 2074.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Coat

      AI will finish it while inventing time travel and it was all finished last week. Unfortunately, time travel creates an alternative reality we can't see.

    2. FIA Silver badge

      <cough> second...</cough>

      The first was a few years earlier, it was all a bit hush hush though....

      1. Dom 3

        meh. The first *real* computer was the Manchester Baby:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby

        1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
          Alien

          meh. I think you're all forgetting about the Antikythera mechanism - which predates those by about 2000 years.

          To quote wikipedia "The Antikythera mechanism is generally referred to as the first known analogue computer."

          1. Jan 0

            Antikythera

            Can you show that the Antikythera was Turing Complete?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        RE: ENIAC

        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.

      3. rcxb Silver badge

        Colossus wasn't general-purpose like ENIAC, and being secret, it did not contribute anything to the state of the art.

        1. rcxb Silver badge

          It's all in the qualifiers... Both the Z3 and ABC computers predated Colossus.

          https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/

    3. rcxb Silver badge

      Charles Babbage would like to have a word with you...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This should be a Rust project. Perfect vaporware.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Pirate

      But then you'd have to emulate the Win95 memory holes in Rust! That is a challenge.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Who's game to implement a custom malloc surrounded by unsafe, just to hear half the fanbois squeal and the other half saying it's much safer now in Rust.

    2. jaypyahoo

      Or use https://github.com/Ironclad-Project/Gloire

  9. LBJsPNS Silver badge

    Just for the record, ReactOS has been worked on for at least a decade and probably longer, and is still a buggy alpha mess. This is going nowhere.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So it's got feature parity with Vista and Windows 8 then.

    2. rcxb Silver badge

      Some projects remain buggy alpha messes for years, despite other projects with similar goals getting things completed quickly.

      IOW, ReactOS's years of barely any progress is NOT indicative of how much time it would or should take to implement a Windows clone.

  10. ThomH Silver badge

    Even this article gives the project too much deference.

    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.

    1. ABugNamedJune

      Re: Even this article gives the project too much deference.

      Takes me back to being fifteen and deciding to write my own OS in ActionScript 2.0

  11. ecofeco Silver badge
    Meh

    But... why?

    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.

    1. ThomH Silver badge

      Re: But... why?

      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.

      1. rcxb Silver badge

        Re: But... why?

        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?.

  12. Mage Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Fantasy

    Absolute fantasy.

  13. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    IT Angle

    Why?

    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.

  14. Dom 3

    Hopeless

    I had a quick look at string.c and found this comment for strcmp.

    // Compare two strings. Should return -1 if

    // str1 < str2, 0 if they are equal or 1 otherwise.

    And the code returns 0, or 1, but not -1.

  15. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Yup

    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.

  16. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Scam

    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.

  17. IGotOut Silver badge

    Tech Press.

    ...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.

  18. MarkMLl

    Text mode?

    Appears to be hardcoded to drive VGA at 80x25.

    If somebody just wanted text-mode Win-32, they could do far worse than revisit Sanos which could at least run its own toolset.

  19. GNU Enjoyer
    Unhappy

    GPLv3 is not the license

    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.

  20. entfe001
    Flame

    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.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      *Chuckle*

      I've had abusive social media posts, emails, comments, and entire articles.

      This is my first abusive source code commit. I feel I have passed some sort of a threshold here.

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > Just in case it is rage-deleted like the dllme.txt file, a full quote:

      Update: he _did_ in fact delete it the next day.

      Thanks for archiving it for posterity. ;-)

    3. Dan 55 Silver badge

      A developer

      Something's got to be done about this "trade", plumbers and electricians have more hurdles to jump before they can call themselves that but anyone can call themselves a developer...

  21. Mockup1974

    I just run my Windows 95 apps in ArcaOS, a real professional still-maintained OS :)

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > Windows 95 apps

      Native Win32 stuff? In OS/2? How?

      WinOS2 is 16-bit only and only has an old version of Win32s.

      Does the Odin WINE-style thing actually work usefully these days?

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        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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