Hi Michael, > Again, theft = original is lost and in hands of thief only.
Yeah I agree that stealing copies is something different from stealing the original but if stealing copies was legal then nobody could sell anything that can be copied which would be a very strange situation if you ask me. > Also again, why do you believe FreeDOS is free of MS-DOS's > intellectual property? That's impossible as you implemented > a "pretty" compatible operating system. The basic interfaces are published and well-documented. This is the case even for Windows if you look at the Microsoft homepage... Other sources of information are RBIL and the Undocumented DOS book which both involve Ralf Brown and many contributors and which both are very old. If Microsoft had any problem with them, why did they not ask Addison-Wesley to pull the book from the market during the last 16 years? Contributors to RBIL even include people from Microsoft who were asked by email to clarify some undocumented details. There was also lots of trial and error involved to find out what interfaces and data structures mean, I guess. > Imagine someone would claim there is MS-DOS's source > code copy & pasted into FreeDOS's source code. ... > What could you do? You would need to stop using FreeDOS > as it probable contains illegal stuff. ... > On the other hand you have no way to confirm whenever > it's the truth or not. Everyone trying to find out > whenever it is the truth or not will violate > itself the law. Isn't this absurd? If it would not be obvious trolling, I would say that MS can ask a neutral third party to compare the freely accessible source code of FreeDOS to a copy of the MS DOS source code which MS would give to that 3rd party under a non disclosure agreement to check that claim. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
