FreeDOS

FreeDOS

FreeDOS 1.1 default shell, FreeCOM
Developer	Jim Hall & The FreeDOS team
Written in	Assembly, C
OS family	DOS
Working state	Current
Source model	Open source
Initial release	12 January 1998; 19 years ago (1998-01-12)
Latest release	1.2 / 25 December 2016; 50 days ago (2016-12-25)
Available in	English, German, Dutch
Platforms	x86
Kernel type	Monolithic kernel
Default user interface	DOS command line interface
License	GPL with various different licenses for utilities
Official website	www.freedos.org

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 floppy disk or USB flash drive. It is designed to run well under virtualization or x86 emulation.

Unlike MS-DOS, FreeDOS is composed of Free Software 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.

The FreeDOS project began 29 June 1994, after Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall who at the time was a student 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 many 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.