FreeDOS Founder Jim Hall: After 30 Years, What I've Learned About Open Source Community

In 1994, college student Jim Hall created FreeDOS (in response to Microsoft's plan to gradually phase out MS-DOS). After celebrating its 30th anniversary last week, Hill wrote a new article Saturday for OpenSource.net: 'What I've learned about Open Source community over 30 years.'

Lessons include 'every Open Source project needs a website,' but also 'consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project.' ('In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.')

But the larger lesson is that 'Open Source projects must be grounded in community.'

Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber...

Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general 'Help me' questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel.

The last of its seven points stresses that 'An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share' (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that 'It's more than just code,' and
Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to 'the great developers and users in our community.'

In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project...
Here's looking forward to more years to come!


Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. 'Jim isn't rich or famous,' wrote RobLimo, '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.'

As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary.

And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.