The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project

Dear (DR)DOS community,

I've been told about the conflict between the author of QCDROM and the FreeDOS developers. I feel the need to write something about this now.

I'm the head developer of a DOS based OS called DESKWORK which (technically) acts like Windows 3.11 - but includes nice features like 3D, MP3, HDTV video, Plug&Play, SATA, burning software... you name it. Japheth has contributed significantly to this in the past few months. The package also include some DOS tools which are available separately here: http://www.deskwork.de/DOWNLOAD/DOS.HTM Our DW-DOS (tailored for the needs of DESKWORK) use DRDOS as a kernel, but offers our own shell and external commands. All software is in German.

Our customers have got some problems when their CD/DVD drives are connected to a SATA or RAID controller. This is the reason why I hereby announce plans to develop a DOS CDROM driver which will use UDMA where available (we're on the edge of integrating this into our OS/burning software, with a successful test proggy). Also, we'll integrate a subset of our PCI Plug&Play code contributed by Craig Heart (Melbourne, Australia) to get hold of all EIDE and SATA controllers (both onboard and RAID cards like Initio, Highpoint, Promise...)

On a personal level, I'd like to add the following 2 cents. Udo, Japheth and myself get along very well in developing our own projects and cross-feeding things to the others. I also get along well with Eric Auer on a personal level, although I must say that I do not like FreeDOS at all. This is mostly because of bugs in previous versions and the fact that it cannot run Windows 3.11 which I personally rely on. However, I explicitly make the DWDOS package available for all DOS flavours, including M$DOS and FreeDOS. I do not think I am in a position to tell users which kernel they should use. If someone gets along with FreeDOS - fine with me.

Putting a lock in a driver to prevent it to run under (insert flavor here)-DOS reminds me of Micro$oft prohibiting Windows from running under DRDOS. This is childish, and disruptive to the whole DOS community. Period.