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With some breaks Villani remained active with the FreeDOS project, including preparations for the release of FreeDOS 1.1. Since 2009 he had also held the role of the project coordinator, but he had to step down in April 2011 for health reasons. The FreeDOS 1.1 release, published on 2 January 2012, is dedicated to him.

In 1996, Villani wrote the book FreeDOS Kernel, which describes the design of the DOS-C / FreeDOS kernel and the original FreeDOS COMMAND.COM command line interpreter. The name of the operating system was subsequently officially changed to FreeDOS to reflect the spelling used in the book.

He previously worked for Stratus Computers, Inc. on their Continuum fault-tolerant product line and also as a consultant for AT&T Bell Laboratories. At Digital Equipment Corporation / Compaq he worked as a principal software engineer on the OSF1 / Digital UNIX / Tru64 UNIX operating system beginning in 1995, and since 2006 had been Acting Director of Communications Infrastructure and Software Architect for Vonage.

Villani joined the FreeDOS project in 1994 after reading Jim Hall's announcement of a "PD-DOS" on comp.os.msdos.misc.apps. In response to Hall's announcement, Villani devised a derivative of DOS/NT named DOS-C with a monolithic kernel and an architecture more similar to the non-multitasking MS-DOS, and in 1995 he made it available for dual-use under a GPL open-source license to become the kernel component of the new "Free-DOS" operating system, as "PD-DOS" was called at this time.

Villani was born in Nocera Inferiore near Naples, Italy, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and moved to Freehold Township, New Jersey, in 1990.

His efforts started when he developed an MS-DOS 3.1-compatible interface emulator to write device drivers in the C high-level language instead of in assembly language, as was the usual approach at that time. This interface emulator grew into a minimal operating system named XDOS around 1988.

In 1976 he received his BSEE degree from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and in 1981 an MSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of New York. In 2008 he also received a Master's certificate in Project Management from George Washington University and he was an adjunct professor at Brookdale Community College beginning in 2010.

Pasquale "Pat" J. Villani (18 April 1954 – 27 August 2011) was an American computer programmer, author, and advocate of free software, best known for his creation of DOS-C, a DOS emulator written in the C language and subsequently adapted as the kernel of the FreeDOS operating system and a number of other projects including DOSEMU for Linux. He used to sign his edits with siglum "patv".