I heard that you were considering a proprietary executable compression scheme for FreeDOS. I'm just writing to let you know the licensing and freedom implications of this.
The compressor rewrites an executable (in the FreeDOS case, one under the GPL), inserting decompression code. This creates a derivative work of the GPL software, so the decompression code at least would need to be under the GPL. The copyright holders of FreeDOS could write an exception to allow non-GPL decompressor code. In order to do this, all copyright holders would have to agree. This would solve the licensing problem, but the output of the decompressor would not be Free Software. So, I hope you won't choose to use a non-free executable compressor. -- -Dave Turner GPL Compliance Engineer Support my work: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=novalis&p=FSF ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
