Guest post: Translating for FreeDOS

Nicolae Crefelean shared this FreeDOS story with us via Facebook, with permission to make it available as a guest post. Thanks, Nicolae!

I discovered FreeDOS about 15 years ago, when I still worked with MS-DOS quite frequently as a sysadmin, so I was amazed to find out about this project. There was still plenty of work to do, but even then it still did a lot of things, there was a lot of software that worked with it, and that was great.

I was so excited about it that I kept telling my colleagues (for a while) what else was new—considering back then the development was very active. But that wasn't enough to compensate for my enthusiasm. So I thought I should translate the FreeDOS Manifesto to Romanian, so others can read a little bit about the project, get curious, share the word, maybe support it, and so on.

That's all I did for this project, but it still felt like I did something important. And as tiny as my FreeDOS contribution was, it was my first contribution to an open source project and it lit up a spark in me. Since then I contributed to many other OSS projects with translations, code, management, tech support, donations, etc. It's been a blast so far! I'll keep at it, as I love doing it. FreeDOS was my first stepping stone to contributing to free software, and that makes it very special for me.

Thanks for keeping the ball rolling, guys! And it's a great initiative to have so much information out in the open.

-Nicolae Crefelean