Hi, On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 6:22 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > Is DOSLFN going to be dropped? I don’t know. It is not up to me and my > opinion is not even relevant. > I have not been informed of any decision to do so. The problem is its > licensing is unclear. There is no > licensing information contained in its source files or with its binaries. It > may be Public Domain. > I have no idea.
You'd have to email the two authors and ask for either clarification or relicensing: Henrik Haftmann and Jason Hood. I already pointed you to the latter's webpage, but I understand if you don't want the tedious burden of doing that. If not, then just keep things simple, don't include it (by default); instead, let users grab it by themselves. Not 100% ideal but certainly less stressful. > Freely available source is not Open Source and is not Public Domain. All > works are Copyright at the > moment of their creation. That's not quite true. U.S. government officials are (sometimes?) forced to keep their works and documents in the "public domain" (which itself isn't a universally accepted idea). At least that's the impression I got (from old TDE 4.0). And things may be different for works predating the major law changes (1988? '70s??). But I have no full grasp of the mess, and none of us are lawyers (or can't afford to hire one full-time, certainly!). Sometimes I think it's impossible to be perfect, too many obstacles, even when trying our hardest. > Regardless if it is declared or not. However, it is nearly impossible to > enforce > a Copyright violation without said notice. But, would you like to see FreeDOS > sued into non-existence > do to a minor copyright violation? FreeDOS is not a legal entity, only a very unofficial loose-knit group of volunteers. The cost of an initial lawsuit against us would most likely outweigh our total assets! Literally nobody would win. However, that doesn't mean we have the right to be lazy and sloppy. (Nor should every spurious complaint be treated as valid.) > Now in regards to my original quoted message. If DOSLFN is found to be > unsuitable, I will not be hunting down an alternative to it. Honestly, it's probably dubious, "as is". So I don't blame you. Certainly, VFAT patents don't expire for another year or two (2017?). I hate to be the bringer of bad news or (accidentally, falsely) imply that it's not legally suitable, as we've all used it for many years, but it's probably not "perfect" by any stretch. > Someone in either the freedos-user or devel group mentioned that there was > another program that did lfn and it was very buggy. I have no idea what it is > called. I can only guess. The only ones I know, offhand, are LFNDOS (GPL) and StarLFN (public domain). I haven't heavily used either, but I've lightly dabbled with the latter (in non-VFAT mode only, LONGNAME.DAT a la DESCRIPT.ION, which is somewhat slow when dealing with lots of files). > I have no idea if it is buggy. If you would like to find a suitable > alternative, it can be considered for inclusion. I hate to be a pessimist, but it's just too much stress for too little gain. DOS users should be used to 8.3 limitations. Some people (ahem, DOS386) would even complain that it's not proper "DOS" software if it can't handle SFNs properly (e.g. some DJGPP-compiled stuff, although that's not DJGPP's fault, per se). I doubt anybody here can really complain. All of us already have all the DOS software we need. The FD 1.2 distro is meant for (presumably) new users or those who haven't used DOS in a while. The diehards already know where everything is, how to find and install it, etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
