The FreeDOS kernel is released under the GPL and will remain so. Getting the agreement of all copyright holders (Pat Villani, John Price, ror4, James Tabor, Tom, Lucho, Martin, many others) to change it is an impossible task.
OK, I see. Many copyright holders...
It all rolls down to someone who wants to squeeze one more K out of the kernel.sys binary. So what, if the packer happens to be incompatible then it just is.
That "someone" is me, Lucho ;-) Have you ever struggled to squeeze our every possible byte to put your program in a ROM? Then you'll understand me!
As I see it, Pat contributed the kernel to the FreeDOS community (not to be underestimated, as I doubt this project would be anywhere without it);
Of course!
the license that he saw fit to do that was the GPL. With the GPL come certain freedoms at a cost of certain restrictions. If some restriction means not being able to compress it 1K further from 43K to 42K (and redistribute the result) then SO BE IT. Write your own exepacker if you don't like it!
I'm just going to register my own aPack copy. Then I'll have the right to distribute the FreeDOS kernel packed with it. As there is NO stub source code (the stub is contructed individually for each executable), I proposed Joergen to release the aPack source code except the aPLib compression library (closed source, open object code), which wouldn't mean less sales for him at all, but I don't have his answer yet. Whatever he decides, I think that once I have the right to distribute aPacked executables, nobody could stop me from doing this, as nobody could stop ANYONE from compiling the kernel source with ANY supported compiler and packing it with ANY executable packer.
As to the GPL "protection", what if Microsoft steals your GPL'ed project? How could you sue them? With their ARMY of lawyers, they'll SMASH you! And they don't care about the public opinion. All they care about is MONEY, which they get mainly from corporations like them, not from users. So, please - meet the press, blame them - what effect could you achieve but NOISE? GPL gives a false sense of security. As long as monolopies like Microsoft exist, they're the MASTERS, like it or not!
Lucho
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