Hi Michael, > Basic question of confusion here: Since FreeDOS is GPL'ed, and since > action was taken in the past against a vendor who distributed FreeDOS with > their commercial product without that commercial product being GPL, and > since SpinRite is not GPL or Open Source, how the heck would GRC use > FreeDOS as its SpinRite distribution base? Is there a redistribution > escape hatch?
Simple. SpinRite is not linked to FreeDOS. They are separate files. Linux distros have been containing closed source programs for years without problems. SpinRite can stay closed source, and FreeDOS can stay open source. GPL only forces SpinRite to tell about FreeDOS and to give every SpinRite user a chance to get the FreeDOS source codes, for example by putting up a copy of the used sources on the SpinRite homepage. About the money: The 20k$ was the DR-DOS buy-out. PTS-DOS would have been, in this particular case, 6k$/year (but it seems to have compatibility problems in some hard-core tests). The newsgroup only mentioned 0.5k$ being invested in fixing a particular bug with ASPI (used for USB here) drivers. Tom already fixed that bug for free, and the fix is part of FreeDOS 2035. Tom gets better compatibility as a reward, which is good because his own commercial product Drive Snapshot contains FreeDOS, too. Drive Snapshot is of course closed source, FreeDOS is open source, but no problem at all! Sure it would be complicated to "pay the community". But Steve could have paid either himself or one of the kernel developers to fix the problem. The "bad" thing would have been that even this "commercial" bugfix would have had to be open source (because it is a kernel modification and the kernel is GPL), so other people can "profit" from the improvement for free. Linux distributors spend a lot of time in improving Linux, but as you can see, improving a free product does not really hurt their revenues. People still buy their distro, because they like a nicely pre-packaged system instead of having to do "LinuxFromScratch". And the distros even contain closed-source components, like proprietary configuration GUI / user interfaces, no license problem either. Debian has a stronger opinion here - they include only open source software and even want it to be compileable with open source compilers. Before the times of NASM and OpenWatcom, that meant that Debian included DOSEMU but not FreeDOS. Alas, FreeDOS still contains several parts which require closed source (like ArrowASM) or even non-free (like TASM/MASM) compilers, although I think the latter is limited to EMM386/HIMEM and a few others (ArrowASM is not clever enough for EMM386 and NASM has too much different syntax). Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by Black Hat Briefings & Training. Attend Black Hat Briefings & Training, Las Vegas July 24-29 - digital self defense, top technical experts, no vendor pitches, unmatched networking opportunities. Visit www.blackhat.com _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
