Talk:Operating Systems

Latest revision as of 01:19, 5 November 2012

Is there a better term for this than "Free Operating System"? To me, that would include free UNIXes or other free OSes unrelated to proprietary systems. The usage here seems to be "free operating systems (that are compatible with non-free systems). Which makes sense for this project, but I'm the terminology seems funny if that's what we mean. Tungol (talk) 07:01, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there a reason we're only listing Free/open source OS here? It's very limiting. this Should be comprehensive

I agree... even if (some of) the authors here have ideological or practical reasons to favor the promotion of free and open-source OSs, the aim of this site is to aid in digital archaeology, which means that people will want to use it to become educated about the range of different operating systems and platforms that have existed over the history of computing, and the compatibilities and incompatibilities thereof, including all systems whether proprietary or open. Dan Tobias (talk) 23:04, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm sorry for not getting on this sooner - I consider this a well-meaning error, indicating that we would be focusing on open standards and in doing so use the open standards of free operating systems. But we should be logging as many known operating systems as possible, with categories created for known formats that are specific to those operating systems. But yeah, "Free" shouldn't be the name of it, although I'm all for noting a particular OS is open-source. --Jason Scott (talk) 00:33, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

My two cents on the issue is that Free Systems should be listed apart as non-free ones have legal issues (copyright being of course the major one). Free OS's can be used independently of any other system and can more easily keep older software alive. Of course we should list all the various OS's, but for the purposes for which I understand this wiki to exist, OS's that can be used without legal issue are better. But whatever :) (I'm not even sure that makes sense.) Michael (talk) 01:00, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

With that same argument, you would also have to list free document formats apart from proprietary ones, because OpenOffice Documents are somehow "better" than Word documents. This is not what this is about. Yes, we probably should add some legal status information to the operating systems (Wikipedia has extensive lists of that), but they shouldn't be separated IMHO --Darkstar (talk) 01:19, 5 November 2012 (UTC)