Hi,

On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 3:56 PM, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
>
> I helped JP Software with the source code release to 4DOS, and the
> license was my greatest mistake in open source software.
>
> In retrospect, I should have stuck to my original suggestion to use the GNU 
> GPL.

You can always ask upstream to relicense. It's happened before (for
other projects):

http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/freeing_an_old_game_moria/

BTW, I like the features 4DOS but never heavily used it. Honestly, I
prefer vanilla shell features (COMMAND.COM) that are
(pseudo-)"portable", supplementing that with various utils as needed
(e.g. sed).

Besides Lucho, there haven't been any noticeable contributors to 4DOS
anyways, mainly due to heavy reliance on non-Free tools. Very hard but
(in theory) not impossible to fix (and sadly an all-too-common problem
for old legacy DOS software). Seriously, DOS developers just never
cared enough to fix things like that, sadly. We really need to
encourage Free tools for future work.

Honestly, we don't need 4DOS, we have FreeCOM, which (IMO) is plenty
good enough. Granted, if somebody cleaned up 4DOS (or even FreeCOM!),
that'd be great, but apparently that's expecting too much.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Reply via email to