On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Rick Holbert wrote: > > Caldera (http://www.caldera.com) is giving away free copies of DR-DOS IMHO (for legal reasons) you have to use the URL http://www.calderathin.com/dosemu/index.html And there you can see the license conditions. > 7.03 for all users of DOSemu (commercial users included). You should read the license details _very_ carefully. My comments: ^^ 1. This only applies to the URL referenced by the 'Click Here to Begin Download' link on the page entitled 'DOSEMU HDIMAGE' and you _must_ use this site, no mirrors allowed. They obviously want to keep the number of downloading people small, because a) the image is bloated to 7 Mbytes (zero padded), though it need only to be about 1 Mbytes (dosemu can cope with 'empty tail'). b) it even isn't compressed by default (Make sure to use wu-ftp's features to force on-the-fly compression which will result in a 400 Kbytes only download. ... though, this maybe the first violation of the license because you then are not using the download button;-). c) no mirrors are allowed and no ones are available which contain the file, ... though the FTP server directs you to use mirrors if it reaches the limit of anonymous users. (For sure not all of the estimated 8 million Linux users will be able to download it. Even if you can suck 1Mbyte/sec from the above site, it would take 2 years to pass each user its copy.) 2. It is only allowed to be used in the combination: Linux & DOSEMU. Which makes it hard to track bugs (you are not allowed to run it native) or to use it on multiple boot installations. 3. you are not allowed to 'redistribute in any fashion' ('any fashion' also applies to putting it on your intranet archive or to copy it to a second machine of your own). 4. you _need_ to download the hdimage for _each_ individual machine you want to use it on (this is a consequence of (3)). 5. You are only allowed to make _one_ copy of the hdimage and this only for backup purposes. Its unlike you can handle this on Unix systems, where backups normally are handled generation wise and you will force the 'have to backup' state after each run of dosemu. 6. You are not allowed to extract files to a Linux-FS, such as to make use of DOSEMU's comfortable bootdir feature. (this is a consequence of (5)). Conclusion: 'violating' the license is more likely than with any other proprietary DOS and the intention behind the license seems to be mainly a marketing thing (which is legal) rather then a real support for DOSEMU. I refuse to make any reference on dosemu.org or even within the DOSEMU distribution to the above URL unless the license conditions do change significantly. ... especially the redistribution and copying conditions. Hans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
