Am 27.03.20 um 23:29 schrieb Jim Hall:
> Yes, as I said in my other email, the 4DOS license was a mistake and I
> should not have suggested that extra term to Rex. This is unfortunate.
You might not have got the sources for 4DOS without those additional
terms, since Rex Conn was worried that freeing the sources might make
someone port it to Windows, hence there would be a competitor to
JPSofts' own products.
Long story short: it might have been the right thing to do at the time.
> I am not trying to turn FreeDOS into a "GPLDOS" though. I think that's
> mis-stating the issue. I have always said that FreeDOS should be free (open
> source). There's no point in having a "FreeDOS" if it cannot be used by
> everyone.
Since the 4DOS sources are open and can be freely used by everyone *on
FreeDOS* this statement holds true if you include 4DOS in FreeDOS. After
all, it's a FreeDOS distribution, not a BSD or Linux distribution.
Otherwise systemd would have never made it into Linux, because it cannot
be used on BSD. Free or not.
> In the past, we've included some software that was free
> ("freeware" or "no cost") but not free (open source). And a few distros
> ago, I decided future FreeDOS distributions should not include things that
> weren't "open source." We discussed that on the email lists at the time;
> this was not hidden. I've been moving FreeDOS to be as "open source" as we
> can make it.
Yes, still... 4DOSes' sources are free. Within FreeDOS at least.
> But the problem is that OSI and FSF (GNU) came long after MS-DOS. There
> were a lot of programs written for DOS (and released with source code) that
> didn't use the GNU GPL, or MIT, or BSD, or another OSI-approved or
> FSF-approved license. So we've always known we need to make exceptions for
> some programs that use other licenses.
I was very happy with FreeDOS 1.1. I don't think that everything must be
free as in open source OSI/FSF approved free.
If you want to be Debian, sure, go ahead. But keep in mind that people
use the deb-multimedia repository for exactly that reason: to get the
non-free stuff that Debian excluded. And also keep in mind that Ubuntu
is the way more successful Debian, and it includes all the "bad" stuff
as well...
In other worlds: Why not give the user the choice? I would have made
three repositories: 1-completely free (open source), 2-free, but with
limitations (open source still, maybe some closed-source stuff), and
3-binary only freeware (without the restriction of redistribution,
naturally).
People who install FreeDOS can then choose if they want to be Debian,
Debian-multimedia or Ubuntu. (Kind of...)
A.
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