Jim Hall is an open source software developer and advocate since 1993. Jim has authored, contributed to, or maintained dozens of open source projects. He is probably best known for his work on the FreeDOS Project, and for usability testing in open source software. He shares his lessons from all these years of working with these passionate people.
What I’ve learned about Open Source community over 30 years from Jim Hall.
In June 1994, several of us had a pretty neat idea: Let’s create an Open Source version of the DOS operating system. On June 29, 2024, the FreeDOS Project will turn 30 years old.
If you don’t know about FreeDOS, let me briefly set the clock back to the 1980s. When IBM sold its first IBM Personal Computer 5150 in 1981, they needed an operating system to run on it. IBM contracted with Microsoft, who in turn worked with Seattle Computing Products, to provide a Disk Operating System (“DOS”) for the IBM PC.
For over a decade, DOS was the dominant desktop operating system. It ran well on low-end hardware and grew to include support for larger storage and memory. DOS offered thousands of great applications and games. If you could imagine it, someone probably had an application to do it. Anyone from the era likely remembers desktop word processors like WordStar, WordPerfect, and PC-Write – or spreadsheet applications including VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro.
