How FreeDOS Grew Up and Became a Modern DOS (2021)

Re:How FreeDOS Grew Up and Became a Modern DOS (2021) by bitwize on Saturday January 29, 2022 @07:08PM (#30132038)

Because it was either agree to those terms, or don't license Windows -- by an enormous margin the most popular PC OS -- for OEM distribution at all.

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Re:How FreeDOS Grew Up and Became a Modern DOS (2021) by badsectoracula on Sunday January 30, 2022 @03:18AM (#30135050)

Or MS-DOS.

I was reading a book on Microsoft's history and they did that back in the DOS days: any IBM PC clone that was sold had to pay for the MS-DOS license regardless of if the PC would be running MS-DOS or not. So unless someone explicitly asked for DR-DOS (and was fine to pay for both the MS-DOS and the DR-DOS license since the former would need to be paid anyway), manufacturers just used MS-DOS because it was "cheaper" (and with MS-DOS being the "standard" it isn't like they could afford to not license it).

The book was written in 1993 btw.

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