On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > I can't imagine anyone taking stuff from a FreeDOS 1.2 release and > *wanting* to issue it as a commercial product. Rex released 4DOS as > open source because it was no longer selling. The world had moved on > from MSDOS and 16 bit, and so had he. > > It is not an impossibility. For example , the current version of the > commercial product SpinRite runs on a FreeDOS boot CD. Although, > I hear the next version will be adding Mac Support and dropping all > Operating System for direct hardware access. > So, not the entire world has moved on yet.
What has that to do with anything? Spinrite is and always has been a commercial product. The vast majority of what ran under DOS back when was commercial. The fact that it *runs* under FreeDOS is irrelevant. It just means FreeDOS is compatible enough with MS/PC/DR DOS that Spinrite *will* work under it. That level of compatibility was a FreeDOS design goal from the beginning. And as I recall, Spinrite only uses DOS to load it. It does not actually use DOS once up and running, and has its own low level code for disk access and testing. The issue is open source code in a FreeDOS distro being used in a commercial product. That may not be impossible, but it's so unlikely that whether the particular open source license freely allows such usage is something I wouldn't waste a moment worrying about. As a rule, if you wish to incorporate open source code into a commercial product, you are expected to get clearance from the author (and likely pay a fee for the right to do so.) If the idea is that only code issued under an open source license that *doesn't* require you to contact the author about commercial usage should be included in the FreeDOS 1.2 distro, that's a profoundly silly notion. > Jerome ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
