FreeDOS

FreeDOS (formerly Free-DOS and PD-DOS) is a free operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. It intends to provide a complete DOS-compatible environment for running legacy software and supporting embedded systems.

FreeDOS can be booted from a hard drive, live CD, USB flash drive or floppy disk. It can also be run using virtualization software like Virtual PC and VirtualBox or x86 emulation software like Bochs and QEMU.

Unlike MS-DOS, FreeDOS is composed of free and open source software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Therefore, its base distribution does not require license fees or royalties and creation of custom distributions is permitted. However, other packages which form part of the FreeDOS project include non-GPL software considered worth preserving, such as 4DOS, which is distributed under a modified MIT license.

History

The FreeDOS project began 29 June 1994, after Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall then posted a manifesto proposing the development of an open-source replacement. Within a few weeks, other programmers including Pat Villani and Tim Norman joined the project. Between them, a kernel (by Villani), the COMMAND.COM command line interpreter (by Villani and Norman), and core utilities (by Hall) were created by pooling code they had written or found available. There have been several official pre-release distributions of FreeDOS before the final FreeDOS 1.0 distribution.GNU/DOS, an unofficial distribution of FreeDOS, was discontinued after version 1.0 was released.