On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Wolf Bergenheim via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Neat program, I guess, but... If Terje had even gone with an MIT or > BSD license... > > I'd stay away from this since it's not released under a proper > license. It's not open source, but rather "source available". This > makes it problematic to include in FreeDOS.
"DOS" has been around longer than that, back to 1981. And for almost as long, people have been making DOS programs (and sometimes giving them away for free). The first version of the GNU GPL came out in 1989 .. and the more popular GNU GPL v2 came out in 1991. And the Open Source Initiative started in 1998, borrowing the Debian Social Contract / Free Software Guidelines (by Bruce Perens) to create the Open Source Definition. That means a lot of "freeware" DOS programs from the 1980s and 1990s were released before "open source" or "GNU GPL" were a thing. If a developer wanted to release their DOS program so others could look at the source code, they either released it as "public domain" or wrote their own "license" to indicate that it was free to use. I often saw the term "freeware" for these kinds of programs, different from "shareware" which was a different thing. Some of the first programs we included in FreeDOS back in 1994 were some of these "freeware" programs. Over time, I've recommended that new programs should use a recognized Open Source license, like the GNU GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, .. or some other "known" license. But because a lot of older freeware DOS programs shared their source code before these licenses became established means we've had to evaluate licenses to see if they are "open source enough." I'm not making an evaluation on this program, but I'll say that at first glance, the license would probably not be a big deal. The license is weird but "ok" for a 1991 program. (The larger issue is that the program isn't widely useful, so we wouldn't include it in FreeDOS for that reason.) > Rebuilding something like it should also not be a very hard thing to > do, though. @Jim this could be your next video (hint, hint, nudge, > nudge) ;). That reminds me -- it's been a while since I recorded a video. The last one was the Christmas tree video. I'll have to do another video soon. :-) I'd like to do a spreadsheet @DATE video, because that feature surprised a few people when I mentioned it on Facebook. And then another programming video. Doing a "build [or port] some program from source" would be a good one to do. I might pick a C program though; those seem to be more popular on the YouTube channel. :-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
