This is a very interesting update. Finally Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS under a recognized open source license. And interestingly, the MIT license (aka Expat license) is compatible with the GNU GPL (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat)
These are very old versions of MS-DOS that do not include more advanced features including CD-ROM support, networking, '386 support, etc. So from a practical side, FreeDOS would not be able to reuse this code for any modern features anyway. But for basic features, such as weird edge case compatibility, we might now be able to reference this code to improve FreeDOS - assuming the All Rights Reserved proves not to be an issue (I am not a lawyer). - I wonder what compelled Microsoft to rerelease the source code under a better open source license? I know I have been asking them to do this for some time, and even met with some reps from Microsoft's open source division. These conversations didn't seem to go anywhere; Microsoft appeared not to have much interest in revisiting the old stuff. But I applaud Microsoft for making this move! This is a great step forward. On Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 3:47 AM Random Liegh via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > I'm sure a lot of you have seen this on Hacker News, etc: > > "Re-open sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0"; > > https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/09/28/re-open-sourcing-ms-dos-1-25-and-2-0/ > > Originally it was released to the computer history museum with a > restrictive license. > > Now, it has been released to github: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS > > Under an MIT (OSI) License. > > > An issue was opened asking for clarification on the license -it'll be > interesting to see what comes of it; > https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/issues/2 > > > I'm not sure this has any value for FreeDOS beyond experimenting (can > this be built by the VAL linker? seems doubtful) and possibly getting > some ideas (something verboten under the originally released license). > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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