Hi, Jim,
On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 6:50 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
>
> I have been working to create a list of packages for FreeDOS 1.3.
>
> I mentioned back in June (as part of a discussion thread about "Removing
> non-free packages")
> that I would like FreeDOS 1.3 to be as "open source" as possible.
>
> I have been going through the packages from FreeDOS 1.2 and examining the
> licenses.
> I've documented this evaluation on the wiki:
>
> I'd appreciate a discussion here about these programs and my evaluations of
> their licenses.
> Especially the ones in red ("no") or yellow ("maybe"). Do you agree with the
> decisions here?
> What are your thoughts on the ones I marked in yellow?
lincrawl ... (aka, Linley's Dungeon Crawl) is something I used to play
a lot years ago (although I was never good at it). But I think it was
Mateusz who packaged it for FreeDOS, not me. It was originally written
for DOS (via DJGPP) by Linley Henzell, an Australian dude. No, I've
never contacted him, but his work ended with version 3.3 or such (many
years ago). The last ten years or so has seen an improved fork called
Stone Soup, which is the popular one nowadays. They got (the parts
they used? or whole game?) relicensed to GPL. Just to quote Wikipedia:
"The game had a quirky license based on Bison's license and the
NetHack License; Stone Soup has contacted every past contributor and
relicensed to GPLv2+." I know that's not exactly the same as saying
the old game is GPL now, but it's close. You'd have to email them
directly to fully clarify, most likely. (BTW, worse news is that they
dropped DOS support around 0.5.5 or whatever a million years ago. So
don't expect sympathy there.) Their site has old 0.5.1 with a DOS
version (2009?), so that's probably roughly the last build.
(Presumably that one has been retroactively relicensed as well, but
you'd have to ask.) They just didn't care after that, and I was too
lazy to waste too much time on it. (Also, it's an incredibly complex
game, perhaps too much, so I kinda burned out on it. It wouldn't be
the end of the world to omit it.)
tppatch ... has no sources. Again, not sure who packaged that. There
are other alternatives with sources (e.g. Veit Kannegieser's R200FIX
asm TSR or Alexei Frunze's BP7_TPL.ZIP / FIX_CRT.PAS), but just having
sources doesn't automatically mean free/libre. So you'd have to email
one of them. (At least Alexei is often around for his SmallerC, which
I still want to make a package of one of these days, hopefully! Sigh,
too much to do.)
psrinvad ... I don't know, I agree that the license is unclear, but
Ralf Quint seemed to indirectly imply that the author gave him
permission to do whatever he wanted with it. (Maybe I misunderstood,
but it's a fairly simple game.) Of course, there are many other
Invaders clones (e.g. one ported from QBASIC to XPL0 and a
Curses-based one called nInvaders and also an old 3D Allegro one that
can build for DJGPP). I would hate to lose this one, after all my
"porting" work, but it's not the end of the world. Yeah, the license
is unclear, but I have no idea how to contact the original author.
curl ... is pretty widespread, so I doubt it has any license problems.
But I'm more concerned that we still only package the old (broken)
version. Even the newer one didn't quite seem to work (for me) while
Wget did fine. Again, I have not had the energy or courage to try
rebuilding this. It shouldn't be impossibly hard, but things like this
are just never easy.
fdnet ... AFAIK, all of Crynwr was intentionally GPL, but some
manufacturers were lax or indifferent. So it should all be GPL'd by
default since that's what Russ Nelson wanted with his original code.
But I guess some ignored his advice. You'd have to email him for
clarification. (But in cases like this, with no one complaining, it's
easier to ignore. Don't worry yourself to death, Jim. I agree some
things aren't perfect, but we're not lawyers. Still, deleting
everything and doing without just because of ambiguity is a bit overly
strict. "Don't be overrighteous!")
doslfn ... not sure if it's free/libre, but it's widely used. Of
course, there are other alternatives, too, of varying quality (e.g.
StarLFN). At least VFAT/LFN is finally unpatented nowadays (I think?).
Again, you may have to contact the (inactive) maintainer for
clarification.
memteste ... based upon an old version, which is hard to find original
sources for. Probably not worth keeping.
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