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from the Why-not-call-it-the-Open-Sea-Shell? dept.
GEOS is getting a fifth shot at life, as the 1990s DOS shell—despite the name, it is not an OS, in the strictest sense of the term—has been released as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license by new owner blueway.Softworks.
Releasing PC/GEOS as open source came with significant hurdles, considering how often the platform changed hands. “After Frank S. Fischer, the former owner and long time GEOS enthusiast passed away, I worked with Breadbox's former CTO John Howard and Frank’s wife, as the new owner, to acquire the rights to give PC/GEOS a future and a new home,” Falk Rehwagen, former Breadbox employee and owner of new rights holder blueway.Softworks, told TechRepublic. “There always was the vision to make the technology available to the community to enable further developments, make it a living and developable system.”
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-pcgeos-found-a-5th-life-as-an-open-source-dos-shell/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:29PM
This is rather for educational purposes - it's probably not easy to build a working software from it. And there's a small confusion with versioning: The "marketing" name was like 4.1.x, not 4.1x which was a bit more internal designation. So 4.13 is usually described as 4.1.3.
Anyone tried to build this? I found a few things missing, sometimes there are apps in asm right off the bat, but it doesn't look like typically generated, but written.
Any info which version of Watcom I need to have to build it (V2??? Watcom V. 2 is like 1980s, probably not even for PCs, this source is much newer)?
Finally, when you chew through higher level code, you find some parts, well, just missing. This is not a problem when there's a document containing information what was not included. There was the same situation with OpenGEM and was fixed as it was clearly known what needs to be added.