Hi, On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 11:50 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Going back to cases, what prompted this discussion was Rex Conn's open > source license for 4DOS, which indicated his source code couldn't be > used in a *commercial* product without contacting him. There was a > question about including it with that restriction. I don't see that as > unreasonable, and it's actually standard practice in most cases.
It's an unacceptable restriction to the "open source" (OSI) and "Free software" crowd, so they will shun the entire distribution (as they already have been, which means less redistribution, less forks, less improvements). Jim Hall is the FreeDOS project head and is heavily in favor of being as free/libre as possible. iBiblio and SF.net are both similarly minded (among others), so it doesn't make a lot of sense to go against the grain. But the DOS ecosystem (or whatever fractured mess is left) is so lazy, stubborn, and ignorant that it seems content to ignore the obvious hazards. I'm not really blaming anyone, but this situation is not very acceptable. Is it better than nothing? Sure, but so is living in a hole in the ground. We have to do better, if only because we need more developers. If we continue to piss them off for no good reason, then we're screwed. "FreeDOS" does not mean "FreewareDOS". That was never the goal, and you can't do much future work with only proprietary blobs. > The implicit assumption is that a commercial offering will be closed > source, and you must contact the author for permission to use it that > way. And I would be flatly astonished if anyone ever *did* contact > Rex about using the 16 bit code he released as open source in a > commercial product. Even if you were correct, it's still not compatible with free/libre ideals, so any developers or users who adhere to those "four freedoms" will completely avoid FreeDOS (and call it "non-free"). > For that matter, I strongly suspect there are license > incompatibilities between stuff currently offered with FreeDOS, in > the sense that you may not be able to lift source from one project and > use it an another with a different license. There are rough edges in Linux, OpenBSD, modern x86 hardware, etc. There is no perfect system (AFAIK). Even just idle thinking, trying to make FreeDOS compatible for the below list, seems mindbogglingly impossible! http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-non-gnu-distros.html Is FreeDOS perfect? No, far from it, but we aren't doing ourselves any favors by being lazy and stubborn. We can't keep making excuses. We have to change and improve. > Everything issued as part of a FreeDOS distro should be open source, The "BASE" should be free/libre (four freedoms), yes, that is Jim's goal. > offered under licenses that permit providing the source along with the > binaries. Whether any of the sources may be incorporated in a > commercial product offered for sale will be governed by the specific > license under which the source is offered. The same will be true for > whether any of the sources can be used in other projects offered under > a different license. It should not be a factor in whether its offered > in a FreeDOS distribution. I just can't explain this any more clearly. FreeDOS must be "Free". It must do a better job of making clear what exactly is free/libre and what is not. I don't want to delete or throw away working software, even proprietary, but we need to heavily emphasize the free/libre stuff and deprecate anything that prevents us from widely redistributing. I'm not saying throw away 4DOS, but if it causes other people to shun the entire project then we need to rethink our goals. The less obstacles the better! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
