Well, the two relevant questions there are: A) is it?, and B) so what?
It’s not like you’re not allowed to provide paid support for a piece of open source software.
At this point I’m not sure what portion of the difference between 4 and 6.22 is relevant or unknown. That’s a pretty well explored platform. I guess this way FreeDOS stays relevant a bit longer? Maybe? It’s not like it isn’t trivial to pull a copy of 6.22. It was trivial when it was new.
If 6.22 is used in military/banking/insurance/energy/heathcare system deep in the critical infrastructure, you don’t want attackers finding weakness in OS that is not patchable.
Making it open source seems to me like the solution to that problem, not the cause. If there is a vulnerability in DOS 6.22 people probably know about it by now. If you’re using it for something critical you probably would have an easier time patching it with full access.
Why wouldn’t you? Why not a later version, or every version? Wouldn’t you like to know the reasoning behind the decision for doing this with MS-DOS 4 specifically? It seems like they’re going through approximately each major revision but is that going to stop at 6.22 or will MS start releasing windows with win 1.0?
Why
To complete that question:
Why… not 6.22?
Precisely. I guess others seemed to get offended
I assume 6.22 is still in production, and might be that even someone is paying Microsoft for support.
Well, the two relevant questions there are: A) is it?, and B) so what?
It’s not like you’re not allowed to provide paid support for a piece of open source software.
At this point I’m not sure what portion of the difference between 4 and 6.22 is relevant or unknown. That’s a pretty well explored platform. I guess this way FreeDOS stays relevant a bit longer? Maybe? It’s not like it isn’t trivial to pull a copy of 6.22. It was trivial when it was new.
If 6.22 is used in military/banking/insurance/energy/heathcare system deep in the critical infrastructure, you don’t want attackers finding weakness in OS that is not patchable.
Making it open source seems to me like the solution to that problem, not the cause. If there is a vulnerability in DOS 6.22 people probably know about it by now. If you’re using it for something critical you probably would have an easier time patching it with full access.
Why question a good thing?
Why wouldn’t you? Why not a later version, or every version? Wouldn’t you like to know the reasoning behind the decision for doing this with MS-DOS 4 specifically? It seems like they’re going through approximately each major revision but is that going to stop at 6.22 or will MS start releasing windows with win 1.0?