Hi all,
MKEYB 0.40 released website http://www.drivesnapshot.de/freedos/mkeyb.htm download http://www.drivesnapshot.de/freedos/mkeyb.zip
changes: now uses APACK for 200 byte smaller executable licensing changed to allow distribution of APACK'ed executables
Tom,
I think there's a problem here. If you recall the discussion with Dave Turner (FSF), he said:
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.
What you have indicated in your release is that you modified the license to allow distribution of the aPack'ed binary. However, you need to have written agreement from all copyright holders in order to do this.
Glancing through your mkeyb 0.40 distribution, I don't see the new license, or the written statement that extends use of aPack.
However, I also don't see a statement that indicates all the copyright holders (contributors to the code when it was under plain GNU GPL) have agreed to the license extension. Peeking at your code, I see at least these contributors: Tom Ehlert, Anton Zinoviev, snoopy81, Arkady Belousov, Bart Oldeman, Henrique Peron, Diego Lastrubini, Pat Villani.
We need to have written agreement from all copyright holders for this code before we can extend the license. Since no one transferred the copyright solely to you, that means we need written agreement from anyone who contributed to the GNU GPL'd code in order to modify the license.
-jh
-- Currently playing: DDR:Max2, Ratchet&Clank, Prince of Persia(GBA)
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