On Sun, 17 Jul 2022 at 19:35, Travis Siegel <[email protected]> wrote:
> For some reason, I'd thought DRDOS has been free for quite some time. No. To add to what others have said about licences and things: Lineo published the source code of DR DOS 7.01. (And AFAIK only the kernel and a few core components such as COMMAND.COM.) There was a lot of interest and the DR DOS Enhancement Project began. Then, Lineo decided that maybe there was still money to be made from DR DOS, and closed the source again. Proprietary paid releases 7.02 and 7.03 followed. There were also 7.04 and 7.05, which were the kernel and COMMAND.COM only, which was licenced to companies such as Symantec and used for boot disks in PowerQuest PartitionMagic, Norton Ghost, some disk managers and antivirus tools and so on. No full OS was released though. Then a full OS of DR-DOS 8 and 8.1 were released, found to contain FreeDOS code, and withdrawn again. A little later, the company was put up for sale. Nobody bought it, which I think is why Sparks is making this announcement now. > I remember when opendos was released as opensource, There is a lot of confusion around here. The product was repeatedly renamed. It's been DR DOS (no hyphen, like PC DOS), DR-DOS, Novell DOS, OpenDOS, DR OpenDOS and other names too. It's all the same DOS. Caldera lost some of the later Novell updates. The DR-DOS Enhancement Project re-created some of the bug fixes, and released 7.01-01 through 7.01-09 (an unfinished WIP release) and then shut down. Then Lineo found some Novell backups and re-incorporated them and published bug fix releases. This was the basis of the 7.02 and 7.03 releases, I believe. > Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this just me misremembering things? I think you are, I'm afraid. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: [email protected] Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
