Hi,
My message was clear as mud without the essential detail. What I had in mind
was the compression of the installation files on the floppy edition, so it
doesn't take hours to install it on pre-386 PCs, but rather minutes.
About contacting Jim Leonard, I was hoping that someone would do that in
official capacity, instead of some random dude online (me). He would probably
respond positively, so it's worth trying to sort out a GPL-compatible license.
That said, if someone has a better solution to the lengthy extraction process,
I'd love to see that in action. I'll probably try baking some install floppies
myself with LZ4_8088, to see for myself how much of an impact it has.
On Tuesday, June 30, 2026 at 11:55:19 PM GMT+2, Jim Hall via Freedos-devel
<[email protected]> wrote:
(reformatted to make this easier to read)
I agree with ECM; as written, this "Demoscene License" is not really
an open source license. But even if it were a recognized open source
license, the extra terms in the "Demoscene License" make it
incompatible with the GNU GPL so it cannot be used with the FreeDOS
Kernel anyway.
On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 2:27 PM E. C. Masloch wrote:
>
> I disagree, it uses a bespoke license that I think is incompatible
> with the GPL. The license text in full reads:
>
> ===
> License
>
> The LZ4 library is provided under the BSD License. However, my code was
> not derived from any of the original LZ4 code so I can provide it via any
> license I choose. So, I am providing my code under what I am calling the
> Demoscene License. The Demoscene License grants you the following rights:
>
> * You are free to use this code in any production, commercial or
> otherwise, without providing remuneration to the author.
> * If you use this code, you must greet "Trixter/Hornet" if used
> in a demoscene production, or "Jim Leonard" if used in a normal
> program. Also, you must send email to [email protected] telling
> him you used the code so he can marvel at your result.
> ===
>
> I think this is nonfree because it fails the desert island and dissident
> tests known from the DFSG, and I think it is also incompatible with
> the GPL. The "greet" part could be argued to be fulfilled by retaining
> attribution in derivatives, hence compatible with FLOSS. But the last
> sentence doesn't seem compatible to anything.
> On at 2026-06-30 12:06:43 +0000, Crefelean Nicolae wrote:
> >Hi,
> >About the floppy edition: please consider creating a special set for
> >pre-386 PCs by using LZ4_8088.
> >
> >Link: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088
> > Important Q&A here:
> >
> >Q: Is this code faster than the LZ4 C source code?
> >A: For 8088-80286 CPUs, yes. For 386+, no, because the 386 has
> >32-bit registers, additional segment registers, and additional
> >instructions. Compiling the LZ4 C code with a suitable 32-bit compiler
> >will produce code that definitely outperforms this 8088 assembly code.
> >
> >On the licensing side, it's basically FOSS, but you can read that bit
> >on the URL I mentioned.
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