Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pat Villani


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   redirect to FreeDOS. However, I have restored the article given the improvement made to it. Black Kite (t)  00:30, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Pat Villani

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Unreferenced article about a deceased software developer. I've been unable to find coverage of this individual in reliable sources to support notability. I suggested redirecting the article to the project he worked on, but the original author objected. WP:ANYBIO, WP:MEMORIAL. Pburka (talk) 16:45, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete as per nom. Keeping this page would seem to me as allowing it only for a memorial page. If this individual merited a page it should have happened within the last 10+ years.  As above, WP:memorial must be considered, and I believe this page is only just that.  I see very little room for growth, given what I could find online, I wouldn't even consider the existing information as a stub, due to the overal lack of significance.  Jab843 (talk) 21:32, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
 * WHY? Yes, it's unreferenced because I'm not familiar with every obscure Wikipedia policy and too tired to read up on boring rules. I don't know of any references outside the funeral home's obit and some online summary of his 2000 NY UNIX Conference talk. Are those good enough? I doubt it. I know it's a wimpy article so far. I tried rallying support for others to help edit the page, but so far nobody has come forward. (I've contacted at least three leads, but none have panned out yet. It's only been three weeks (!) since I first created the page, and he only died unexpectedly less than three months ago. I'm not sure most people even know, at least old coworkers.) Besides, it's not like the article is wasting precious space on the servers. There are much more useless articles, and I'm (barely) astonished how quick people are to delete it. How about going after AC Transit Bus Fight or (related) Motherfucker pages first?? (I'm not kidding. What is important about those??) How will any decent articles ever get written if you delete them before they can mature? I don't find 90% of articles about people on Wikipedia notable, but I don't go around asking to delete their articles either. If even Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) doesn't care about biographies of software authors, who will? As for notability, he was neither a friend, coworker, nor relative of mine. I just thought he was worthy of being remembered for his accomplishments, not just for emotional reasons. But yes, his unexpected death was indeed the impetus for the article since I was surprised one didn't already exist. (I went way out of my way to add to Wikipedia here, and it's not encouraging seeing such a negative response.) Armslurp (talk) 23:53, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
 * One obvious reason we need references is verifiability. Although in this case I believe that you created the article in good faith and that the article is probably accurate, imagine if someone posted an obituary for a person who was still living. Without reliable evidence that the person is deceased Wikipedia could, in fact, be hosting content which was harmful and hurtful to the subject. Apart from the liability issue, we have a moral obligation to ensure that our content is accurate especially where it relates to living people. Pburka (talk) 14:39, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * If you check the original article, I did a link to the funeral home online. (Is that proof enough? Believe it or not, Find a Grave doesn't have him [yet??].) He announced being sick in April with some illness (unnamed) that "would take up all [his] time", hence his departure from the FreeDOS project (again). And that's all I knew, as I didn't want to pester him via email, until I found out via Jim Hall that he had passed away. (Still don't know the cause. I think? he had cancer years ago.) Me linking to the funeral home was hoping someone would (properly) add a photo since they had a ton for him. I didn't know the right way to insert one, so I didn't (so far), too much else on the brain. I didn't point directly to his section because I was afraid the URL was too fragile and might disappear, so just generic funeralhome.com was it. And someone very quickly deleted that (as well as a brief mention of his family, which I thought was relevant as personal/background info, sigh). No, I didn't add bagatela about him being Catholic or modeling the NY subway specifically because I figured someone would take issue with the notability of such trivia. Believe it or not, I was pretty cynical about Wikipedia already before writing the article. Good to know I was correct. Armslurp (talk) 22:20, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The style is encyclopedic, but the article has no sources. Why should I look for sources when you should have been using them to write the article?  If you think that with more time you can find some newspaper articles, or some books, magazines, etc., with the information, you can ask for Userfy.  Otherwise, expect that your work will be hidden from view without an apology...now is the time to save a copy.  Also, you might consider making a webpage with what you have written, he does seems to be someone that should be remembered.  And if you can get established magazines to write articles about him, then you have sourcing.  Unscintillating (talk) 07:05, 14 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 00:21, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 00:22, 13 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator and per Jab. I think Armslurp's experience is directly related to his attitude that notability and sourcing are obscure policies. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS isn't a reason to keep. Any and all information about this person's accomplishments can be covered in other articles with a passing mention. Personally, I think Armslurp should go around nominating pages if they're not encyclopedic. JFHJr (㊟) 02:41, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete: as above. I also echo JFHJr's sentiments.  Far from being "boring" or "obscure," the requirement that articles be reliably sourced is front and center as Wikipedia's fundamental, irreductible core policy, and anyone who after four years on Wikipedia finds it too much effort to follow is - frankly - not an asset to the encyclopedia.  (The article's creator, after all, went no more "way out of his way" to create the article than have tens of thousands of anonymous editors in creating theirs.)  It is not Wikipedia's "job" to care about biographies of software authors; it is Wikipedia's remit to care about well sourced biographies of notable people.  A fallacy often expressed at AfD by aggrieved article creators is that if reliable sources aren't available for their subjects, Wikipedia's rules are at fault.  Wrong: if reliable sources cannot be found discussing their subjects, the subjects are not notable.  Ravenswing  06:25, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It's easy to discount someone whom you don't know, especially online. Overall my contributions have always been very minor, and I've only created a new page twice (one very short [eventually inserted elsewhere], other an extremely useless Talk: page). I didn't remember even doing that until rechecking since it was so trivial. So no, I haven't had decent practice adding references, pictures, etc. I expected someone with more experience to help with these things eventually (coming weeks), but apparently not. As for being an asset, I can't help but wonder how you think deleting non-notable articles trumps those who actually write them. BTW, when I say "out of my way", I mean that I took the initiative to learn a bit about the author, create a decent (IMO) start of a page, and email a few people to weakly attempt to get outside contributors. The FreeDOS Wikipedia page already linked to his (blank) page for who knows how long, and I was initially surprised he didn't have one with any content. Yes, I think Wikipedia is at fault, not because the article is perfect as-is but because I don't see the problem. Why would anybody complain about an extra (very small) article? It's not doing any harm. But alas, a bio of a real human being isn't notable. I'm sorry his (past) life offends you guys so much. Armslurp (talk) 22:20, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not that anyone's saying the guy offends their sensibilities, just that there's a protocol that absolutely must be followed as far as articles go, both in creating them as well as deleting them. You have to have reliable sources to prove that someone is notable as far as Wikipedia is concerned. It's good that you showed initiative, but this just falls short of what would be considered notable on Wikipedia. You also can't rely on other people to fill in the blanks and provide reliable sources that would prove notability and keep the article around. Unless it's something or someone that's very much in the public eye (ala Lindsay Lohan or American Horror Story), always assume that you will be the only one searching for sources and information to improve the article. Also, the best way to be taken seriously is to try to act calmly and maturely. I understand that you're upset that your article is up for deletion, but we've all had stuff get deleted, reverted, or Afc declined. It's just a way of life here on Wikipedia. If you really want to save the information that badly, I highly suggest looking into seeing if you can userfy the page. (WP:USERFY) That would allow you to keep the page on your own namespace and work on it until it's good enough to have a page on Wikipedia proper. As far as "it's just a tiny page", that's not really a valid argument. If we made an exception for this page then we'd have to make an exception for everyone who states that and then we'd have a lot of pages that wouldn't even begin to have any sort of notability to them. Tokyogirl79 (talk) 00:18, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
 * No objection to userfying here.  Ravenswing  12:58, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Reply: As it happens, I've created over sixty articles and have over 30,000 edits, which has required quite a bit of work over the years. I just don't consider that to be "out of my way" or requiring initiative to the point that I'd demand special treatment - if I didn't want to do the work, I wouldn't have done the work, and no editor gets special treatment here, from the top of the contribution list down to a newcomer making his or her first edit.  The problem is quite simple: Wikipedia requires that articles be properly sourced, and likewise requires that articles that cannot be properly sourced be removed.  If the article creator feels aggrieved and "cynical" because Wikipedia has standards subjects must meet in order to qualify for articles, I'm sure he could take his work to the Encyclopedia Britannica or to World Book Encyclopedia and see if they're more lenient than Wikipedia is. Ravenswing  02:19, 14 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment - Okay, new creator who is buried under Wikipedia's massive rules edifice and no sources showing = no verifiability. We can all agree on that. Now let's take a fresh look and see if this is an individual who meets General Notability Guidelines, shall we? I've got THIS INDICATION that the individual existed, that he was a "Compaq Unix Software Engineer" important enough to be a speaker at a New York computer group in Nov. 2000. Carrite (talk) 17:31, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Villani was the author of the 2001 book Programming Win32 under the API. Carrite (talk) 17:35, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Villani seems to have been the developer of something called FreeDOS Kernel, an MS-DOS emulator, PER THIS. Carrite (talk) 17:37, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * So far, none of those sources have any relevance to the GNG, which holds that a subject is considered notable if he is discussed in "significant detail" in multiple reliable sources.  Ravenswing  17:42, 15 November 2011 (UTC)


 * (EC: not directed towards the above) Which brings me to Wikipedia's page on DOS, which notes: "The FreeDOS project began 26 June 1994, when Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall then 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. A kernel, the command.com command line interpreter (shell) and core utilities were created by pooling code they had written or found available. There were several official pre-release distributions of FreeDOS before the FreeDOS 1.0 distribution was released on 3 September 2006. Made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), FreeDOS does not require license fees or royalties." Now look, there's not a single damned thing so far that counts as a "reliable source," but if you aren't getting very uneasy by now that this is a possibly an important freeware pioneer, you aren't paying attention... Carrite (talk) 17:43, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Or that we haven't seen any cites saying so, which is the only factor which matters, as you know perfectly well. Speculating as to the fellow's importance because he's listed as a developer on a project is just that - speculation - and we can infer nothing from it.  Failing the GNG, the only other applicable criteria are those of WP:CREATIVE, but the bar is set pretty high there, and it's near-to-impossible to pass WP:CREATIVE without satisfying the GNG.  Ravenswing  17:48, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, checking the criteria given at WP:CREATIVE, I see points 1 and 3 applying to our case here. Pat has been important for the FreeDOS project, and if you check the various freedos-user and freedos-devel(oper) discussion forums (some of them are online, but this may not be the case for all the older discussions in the 1990s - I do have archives, but can't access them easily now). He is frequently named and cited in there by co-developers. This, beyond any doubts, proves WP:CREATIVE point 1, not because these were "reliable sources" as is, but simply because they exist. Nobody will question the existance of FreeDOS and these mailing lists. Also, it is without any question, that he was the sole developer and contributor of the original version of the FreeDOS kernel, and, with other developers, continued to work on it over many years. Nobody needs a reliable source to prove simply facts like this, because it is obvious, beyond any doubt. Anyone can look this up in the source code archives, if he likes. This is equivalent to the example given in WP:OR, that Paris is the capital of France. This is obvious and it is, as per WP policies, enough to assume that the fact is verifyable ("a source exists"). It is not necessary to actually bring forward sources for this. The ultimative proof of facts is the source code of the operating system. The discussions in the mailing lists can be seen as mere "reflections" on this, and it doesn't matter that mailing lists are not reliable sources, if the topics discussed there are about facts, which are beyond any doubt.
 * WP:CREATIVE point 3 applies at least to some extent, the person has created and played a major role in co-creating a significant and well-known work and collective body of work, FreeDOS. Besides Villani's own book about FreeDOS, the operating system has also been covered in other books (I think, I even have one of them in my library - will have to recheck this). The FreeDOS product / work also has been the subject of many thousands reviews in the net and (understandably to a much lesser extent) in printed magazines, and whenever there was an abstract about the system's history, Pat Villani is briefly named as the original author of the kernel. I would not count most of these reports as reliable sources in the WP sense, but again, reliable sources are not needed to proof obvious facts, such as 1 + 1 = 2, or Paris is the capital of France, or the FreeDOS kernel was originally developed by Pat Villani. It is enough to assume verifyability, and verifyabilty exists in the source code which is freely available to anyone to look at (although non-developers probably won't be able to make much sense of it).
 * WP:ANYBIO point 2 may apply here as well, although it is a bit too early for historians to write about DOS. ;-) (There was some coverage, when DOS became 25, and typically FreeDOS was mentioned there as well as a newer alternative to MS-DOS.) But if historians will do so in the future, FreeDOS will clearly be one of the DOS operating systems discussed alongside MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS, and if authors / developers will be mentioned, it is clear that Pat Villani will have to be named as the original author of DOS-C, which became the FreeDOS kernel, just as Tim Paterson will have to be named as the original author of 86-DOS, the operating system which became MS-DOS. There wasn't really much original or innovative in this work of Paterson, 86-DOS was basically a (rather buggy) clone of CP/M (which was originally designed and developed by Gary Kildall, a major innovator of the industry, who influenced the core design of operating systems and compilers up to the present). 86-DOS/MS-DOS had many drawbacks compared to CP/M, but it was cheaper and also came with some notable improvements, such as a different buffering logic and the introduction of the FAT12 filesystem (which, however, was actually based on prior work by Marc McDonald). Nevertheless, the product became important by circumstances and so became Tim Paterson as its original author. In analogy, there wasn't really much new in DOS-C/FreeDOS, an operating system with the intended goal to be a clone/emulator of MS-DOS. However, FreeDOS became important because it was free and open-source and stepped in when MS-DOS was abandoned (with the only other alternative being DR-DOS, arguably much more advanced in compatibility, stability and feature set, but a commercial product and closed-sourced). While not 100% compatible, for many applications, where DOS was and still is used today, FreeDOS is "good enough" (and in the tools/utilities department, it is even much better than MS-DOS). Finally, the fact, that a DOS kernel was successfully written in a high-level language such as C, is innovative and original, and this must be attributed to Pat Villani.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:39, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, I had a look in my lib and besides Villani's own book on FreeDOS "FreeDOS kernel - An MS-DOS Emulator for Platform Independence & Embedded Systems Development", I found both FreeDOS and DOSEMU to be covered in numerous places in the book "The Multi-Boot Configuration Handbook" by Roderick W. Smith, published in 2000 by Que, ISBN 9780789722836. Villani isn't mentioned explicitly, but neither are any other people. As per WP:CREATIVE, if the work is covered in reliable sources, this makes its original creator ("a person who has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work") likely to be notable as well. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:41, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps I should explain why a DOS kernel being written in C instead of assembly language is important and quite an achievement, given that many other operating systems are written in high-level languages and nobody recognizes this as something special. The reason, why this is much more difficult for a DOS kernel, is that most "serious" DOS programs do not only use the documented APIs (which can be easily emulated), but retrieve and change data in internal data structures of the operating system. In some cases, software even starts patching code sections in the runtime image of the DOS kernel - Windows, for example, is known to do this to quite some extent. For this to work, even intrinsical details deep inside the DOS kernel become important to be properly emulated. This goes down to the exact memory layout and order of internal data structures and tables, calling conventions of internal functions, and the emulation of exact opcode strings in various locations. Once it is known, that some application depends or modifies such DOS internals, it is "relatively" easy to emulate this in assembly language, but in a high-level language such as C you do not normally have any control over the machine level representation. These problems do not occur in most modern operating systems, since their applications do not (and cannot) normally use internal structures of the operating system and communicate only via officially documented methods, but it is an integral part of the "business" under DOS. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:53, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete Comment - I'm ultimately not seeing anything that gets this article subject over the GNG bar. There might be a few biographical bits that can be merged to FreeDOS, such as Mr. Villani's dates. There might be a case that this was a key software pioneer, but I'm frankly out of my element. My condolences to Mr. Villani's family and friends for their recent loss, deletion does not indicate Mr. Villani's life or work is dismissed as unimportant, only that there is insufficient substantial and independently published source material to support an article according to Wikipedia's long-established notability guidelines. Carrite (talk) 17:59, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Striking Delete recommendation. I have a hunch that this is an individual worthy of encyclopedic biography, despite being unable to find sourcing myself. Carrite (talk) 16:03, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * No Contest - I'm over the five stages of grief at this point. So I accept whatever Wikipedia decides. (It's not like I have a choice either.) I just watched the page like a hawk and kept expecting people to add to it, and nobody did. And then it was nominated for deletion (only three weeks later, which I thought was exceedingly short) and pretty much immediately redirected to FreeDOS, which literally said nothing about him except his name. (In fact, as mentioned, the link was already there, just to a blank page; same for Tim Norman, whom I know literally nothing about.) I just don't understand how anybody thinks you can inline anything about Pat himself into the FreeDOS article without being majorly off-topic. "FreeDOS was based upon DOS-C, a rewritten GPL version of DOS/NT (once used commercially for 68000 machines) by Pasquale "Pat" Villani, a competent OS engineer from New Jersey who used to work at DEC/Compaq and later at Vonage when not modeling the NY subway system or doing amateur ham radio or attending St. Robert Bellarmine church." (Seems a bit long and off-topic if all you care about is FreeDOS. And that's obviously excluding dates, mailing list archives, technotes, etc., which I seem to gather aren't really notable sources.) I guess if I actually owned the FreeDOS book I could hope (?) it had some relevant bio info on him to quote from. But sadly, I don't think a funeral home online is considered a reliable source, and certainly NY Unix conference sounds good, but I wasn't personally there. (Look, I already admitted on freedos-user that I probably wasn't the guy to write the article, but since nobody else even pretended to volunteer, I had to do something. Unfortunately, I seriously didn't know anybody would complain ... as long as I could get others to help eventually.) The simple truth is that FreeDOS isn't as popular as Linux by a long shot, maybe if it was called PatDOS or something. And nobody thought he'd die so young, so I guess he was just majorly overlooked by mainstream media. Alas. Anyways, yes, it should probably go on a private website and not Wikipedia if you guys don't want it. Armslurp (talk) 18:48, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * P.S. Not to pick on you guys too hard, but "long-established" seems a stretch. The very first (anonymous) 2002 revision of the FreeDOS article literally only says this (and took almost two years before reaching over 1 kb): "An open source DOS initiated by Jim Hall. http://www.freedos.org/". It's hard for me to match such quality. :-)
 * Keep - Pat Villani has been the original author of what later, in 1994, became the kernel of FreeDOS, the core component of the operating system. For those who don't know, this is the equivalent of what is called IO.SYS/MSDOS.SYS in MS-DOS, IBMBIO.COM/IBMDOS.COM in PC DOS, and DRBIOS.SYS/DRBDOS.SYS in DR-DOS. FreeDOS, a free and open-source MS-DOS compatible operating system, had a huge impact on the industry and is still being actively developed and used in many places today (although it is not a mainstream OS, and, if used in embedded systems, it is not immediately visible to end-users). Without Pat's contribution and continued maintenance of the kernel over many years, FreeDOS would hardly have had the success it has.
 * Pat started to develop his operating system in the late 1980s as a vehicle for the development of device drivers. IIRC, it was called XDOS in ca. 1988, NSS-DOS in 1991, and DOS/NT in 1992. It was not originally designed for Intel x86 processors, but for Motorola 68000 CPUs (which have a completely different instruction set). However, because he wrote his OS in the C high-level-language, it was easily portable across different system architectures. His system was therefore called DOS-C, when it became part of the FreeDOS project (still called "Free-DOS Alpha 1") in ca. October 1994.
 * While the front-end API to applications was inspired by the MS-DOS API, the originally contributed version, though functional as is, was only loosly compatible with MS-DOS programs. Lots of internal data structures were completely different from those found in the MS-DOS kernel, so misbehaving programs did not run. However, prior to the integration of DOS-C into the FreeDOS project, this hasn't been a problem, because Pat didn't intend to run out-of-the-box DOS programs on his OS, but develop his own applications and drivers for it. Nevertheless, for FreeDOS, it now was a requirement to load existing DOS drivers and run DOS applications without recompilation, so over the course of the years lots of things were changed in the kernel and gradually the FreeDOS kernel became more and more MS-DOS compatible.
 * Back in 1994/1995 or so, I still remember discussions with Pat and others, where I stated, that an operating system written in a high-level language will never be able to become 100% MS-DOS compatible, since too many undocumented "hacks" are necessary to achieve full MS-DOS compatibility and support dirty applications, which cannot be emulated easily in a high-level language (MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS are all written in x86 assembler), and also because the output of a compiler is much less efficient as professionally written hand-optimized assembler code, and this counts quite a bit under DOS. While I still think that this statement holds true, FreeDOS has meanwhile reached a level of compatibility, I would not have expected. Been written in C has probably also been a factor in attracting more developers and make debugging much easier.
 * So, if FreeDOS is notable, Pat Villani is as well. The article will clearly need more work and references, but this is just a matter of time. FWIW, I can personally confirm the FreeDOS stuff written there to be fact, and I think I have recently read the bio details in his obituary, but I would have to recheck this. Also, I own his book "The FreeDOS kernel", and while I don't have the time to cite from it right now, I may do so later on. Therefore I recommend to not delete this article stub, but to keep and improve it. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:22, 15 November 2011 (UTC)


 * YIKES! Matthias, it's you! (This guy also heavily deserves his own page, at least for his DR-DOS experience.) You're mostly correct, of course, but I count five to two, so I think we lose.  :-( --2011-11-15T23:25:31‎ Armslurp
 * Blush. ;-)
 * AfD is not a voting process. If it can be reasonably shown, that the subject meets WP's criteria of notability, a single recommendation to keep should be enough. At least in my book, a key developer of an operating system, which is used on uncountable desktop and embedded machines worldwide, is quite notable. And Pat was not only that, but also one of the "fathers" of FreeDOS and for several years the project leader. From the arguments brought forward above, I seem to understand that it wasn't really clear what exactly "FreeDOS" and a "kernel" is and what role and impact Pat might have had in the project. With the additional information given here we might have helped the others to get a better picture on this already. I don't think it would be too difficult to find references to back up the stuff mentioned in the article, it would just need some effort to note everything down. I seem to remember there were also some articles in the printed press mentioning him when FreeDOS 1.0 was released, but it may take a while to track them down. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:45, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * But for completeness, here's a rough Pat-related timeline (from what little I can gather from random searching on Google and Google Groups' comp.os.msdos.misc archives):
 * sometime in 1994 - MS claims to soon discontinues stand-alone MS-DOS in favor of Win95 (aka, MS-DOS 7.0 + Win 4.0 bundled)
 * June? 1994 - Jim Hall starts P.D. DOS project and publishes some utils (and manifesto, compatibility, todo, etc.) but no kernel yet
 * Nov. 1994 - Pat donates DOS/NT kernel as "non-commercial" closed source
 * May 1995 - Free-DOS alpha 3 released (now with Pat's GPL'd DOS-C kernel)
 * Aug. 1996 - _FreeDOS Kernel_ is published (in paper form)
 * 1996? - DOSEMU [Hans Lerman?] succeeds in adapting to work with DOS-C kernel (instead of only proprietary MS,PC,DR)
 * 1996? 1997? Caldera's OpenDOS isn't really "open" enough for most people (soon closed)
 * July 1997 - Pat defends GPL'd Free-DOS' bugginess, esp. since he works on it for free ("hundreds of hours")
 * the printed book made little money, took him "two years to write" (for personal gratification)
 * but he still has a day job working as (unnamed, DEC Tru64??) OS engineer
 * 1998? - FreeDOS beta1
 * 2001? - Pat leaves the project (colon cancer? and?) "disgusted with the bozos"
 * 2001 - FreeDOS beta5, beta6, beta7
 * April 2002 - FreeDOS beta8 (last to have premade full floppy install set images)
 * IIRC still using Pat's very slow floppy accessing code
 * 2003 - OpenWatcom 1.0 (which supports all DOS-specific compilation models, can build kernel)
 * 2006 - FreeDOS 1.0 final (MS-DOS compatible) finally released
 * ?? - dunno, I had never been in contact with him until Jim went on extended hiatus in 2009
 * which is when Pat stepped in again as head (and I really only barely jumped in after 2006)
 * 2009 - Pat rejoins FreeDOS as head, lots of ideas (and notes), though no major release
 * (still lots of little updates, but there is little coordination, volunteers are extremely scarce)
 * April 2011 - Pat gets sick (unknown cause) and publicly leaves, Jim returns
 * late 2011 - some unfinished 1.1 test#3 work, Pat dies, not much else :-( --2011-11-15T23:31:20‎ Armslurp


 * Comment: I'm tempted to suggest that we sit on this one, to see whether there are obituaries published in the next couple of months. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:29, 16 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment: In comments to other statements above I have given some explanation why I find this subject to be notable although it does not seem to be easy to find a reliable source directly supporting Villani's notability in short time. My argumentation above is an indirect one along the line that FreeDOS is a notable work (proved formally) and Villani as the original developer of the FreeDOS kernel has thereby become notable as well (or "is likely to be notable" as WP:CREATIVE puts it). Nevertheless, it would be better to have reliable sources directly mentioning him, not only his work - they may exist, but I could not find them online so far. It has been suggested to wait a while to see if it will be covered in the press once the "news" spreads. It has also been suggested to merge the contents into the FreeDOS article (or user page) and redirect Pat Villani to FreeDOS, something I would support as well if the Villani article would otherwise be deleted, however, I would still prefer it to remain a separate article with a scope different from what can be done in the FreeDOS article. As I see it, his biographical details would hardly belong in the FreeDOS article, and we may be able to flesh this out a little over time. The Villani article could also have a short section on how DOS-C came into existance and later became the FreeDOS kernel, and it could discuss Villani's achievement in developing a DOS-compatible kernel in a high-level language such as C (instead of in assembly language, which would have been a more natural choice from the viewpoint of DOS system-level development). Nevertheless, I don't envision the article to ever become longer than perhaps one or two pages, unless Villani would be known also for other public achievements besides his fundamental involvement with FreeDOS. I can't comment on this, as I knew him from the FreeDOS project only. If the article is not deleted, I would be willing to contribute some bits to it over the course of months and add some references, but it might be a wasted effort for as long as a Damocles sword such as AfD hangs above the article. Therefore, I'd like to learn the other commentors' view on this, especially those who suggested a deletion. Do you still strictly feel the article should be deleted or do you now, with possibly a bit more background on Villani's involvement with FreeDOS, see some form of notability (although it would still require some degree of goodwill in the interpretation of the policies as it stands so far)? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:15, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Hm, perhaps I have found what we're looking for (but it's not online any more, unfortunately). At the time FreeDOS 1.0 was released in 2006, FreeDOS was also covered in the news - online, broadcasted and in printed press. One news on FreeDOS explicitly mentioning Pat Villani as the original author of the kernel seems to have been broadcasted in ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), one of Germany's national public-sector television channel, on 2006-10-21. Google's cache still reveals a snippet of what appears to have been online, "Der Welt ein Debüt geben", heute.de Nachrichten, ZDFheute.de: "Dann meldete sich ein Entwickler, Pat Villani, der schon mal einen DOS-Kernel namens "DOS/NT" geschrieben hatte und bereit war, ihn freizugeben", which seems to have been online under the following link (but has been removed meanwhile): ]. I haven't seen it myself, so I cannot comment on it, but it obviously mentioned Villani. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:07, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Userfy Even if we agree that the software engineer is sufficiently notable (WP:N), the article still has zero sources.  You would have an article with no verifiable (WP:V) content.  As far as the possibility of "some degree of goodwill", anything is possible, we even have a policy called WP:IAR, which means that we always allow for the possibility of ignoring all of the rules.  But for whatever reason Wikipedia attracts people whose focus in life is getting articles here deleted.  In addition the administrators have a huge work-load in deleting literally thousands of articles on a daily basis created by people all over the world for the vaguest of reasons, and as a group they get to the point that they have little interest in seeing the silver lining in the cloud.  Your willingness to work on the article over the course of months suggests that you ask for incubate or userfy.  Unscintillating (talk) 16:40, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Redirect. No issues with the sourcing but the subject is insufficiently notable. Redirect to FreeDOS. --Joopercoopers (talk) 01:03, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment. In the hope I can address most of raised issues, in particular to give evidence of notability, I have meanwhile started to improve and expand the article and added various references as well (perhaps not the best possible ones, but for most of the important facts there is more than a single source and I did my best to cross-check the sources to be accurate). There is at least one series of published articles still to be added, and I am trying to track down more patents as he held more than just the two I found so far. Another area to look at is his role as maintainer of his "Linux for Windows 95" distribution and his early source code contributions to the Free Software Foundation/Richard Stallman. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.