Hi, On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:38 AM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > I am not a lawyer, but over time I have received advice from lawyers.
Jim, at risk of sounding very naive (or very stubborn), there's absolutely no reason to worry about things like this without some kind of official court judgement directly applied to us. Everything else is just a guessing game, letting irrational anxiety control us. Unless someone can officially prove infringement, then it's not worth destroying anything just on an unofficial whim. > I understand it is the direct viewing of proprietary source code that > matters. If you examine Microsoft's source code, then you become > "tainted" (legal term to mean information was obtained illegally or > unlawfully). I am told such knowledge is also called "fruit of the > poisonous tree." If you only examined someone else's open source code > that may be (unknown to you) tainted by proprietary source code, then > you do not become tainted. There is absolutely no point in legally redistributing (under any license) readable source code unless you are permitting someone else to read and learn from it at will. No, you usually can't "copy" verbatim large chunks of code (since everything is locked down, copyrighted, by default), but you can still try to understand the gist of it. If they didn't want you to read it, only compile it, then they could shroud it (as many have done before). So it's wrong to say that you become tainted by reading it. Reading it is the whole point, there's absolutely nothing else you can do with it (except compile, which doesn't need to be "readable"). As long as you don't "copy" any large sections of it (since small, obvious bits aren't unique enough to be copyrighted), you should be okay. Reading but not using is not stealing, and proving damages for something like this heavily depends on any commercial use (for which there is none for MS-DOS 2.0). > While I understand some people think it an overreaction, we must avoid > any suggestion that we benefit from proprietary source code. I do not > think it likely that Microsoft would take action against an open > source DOS operating system in 2016, but that does not matter. The > right thing to do is avoid proprietary source code in developing > FreeDOS. Jim, we don't even publicly know what files (utilities, besides kernel) were in the MS-DOS 2.0 release. Do you? I certainly didn't care, it's way too old. It won't even run obvious things like DJGPP. So it's of extremely limited use. I question the usefulness of them releasing only ancient versions at all, except maybe for historical purposes. FreeDOS long ago surpassed MS-DOS 2.0! But even for those few utilities, how would they even transfer? How would you learn or improve anything from (I don't know what) REPLACE or MOVE or DEBUG? Give me a break, there's nothing to learn there, and they presumably aren't in the same programming language / dialect anyways. > For any developer who did examine the MS-DOS source code, I ask that > they do not contribute to FreeDOS programs that replace MS-DOS > functionality. Specifically, this means programs in the Base category: > > However, FreeDOS includes extra functionality not found in MS-DOS. > These features did not exist in any version of MS-DOS. Even if you > have studied the MS-DOS source code, I believe you can contribute to > the non-Base parts of FreeDOS. Linus Torvalds heavily studied and used Minix sources, which was a UNIX (tm) clone. It was not free/libre at all, they were commercially selling it with their text book about OSes. Linux eventually wrote his own kernel, even reusing minixfs, and made it available under a "free for commercial use" (GPL) license! Nobody stopped him. If anything, he thrived because so many people saw the usefulness of it. I tried to tell you this. People are meant to learn from others. Schools use source code as a teaching method all the time. All programming books have source code as example. The only thing you can't do is copy verbatim large sections of code (and redistribute or sell it, at least not without permission). Of course, patents are horrible and purposely overcomplicate everything. But you don't have to worry about that either because any alleged patents (from MS-DOS 2.0, circa 1983) are long expired. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=267308311&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
