Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On Sun, 17 Jul 2022 at 23:12, Jim Hall wrote: > > I think it's great that DRDOS updated their statement on CP/M. Agreed. > I would > have preferred he used a recognized open source license like MIT or > GNU GPL or another license, rather than make his own statement here, > but this is definitely a good step forward. I think that would have needed lawyers to be involved, and thus, spending money. Possibly quite a lot of money. Whereas an email is free. > Be careful not to carry it too far, though. Bryan's statement is only > about CP/M. While he says "and its derivatives," my interpretation is > this statement applies only to the CP/M source code, and derivatives > from the CP/M source code as it exists now. I fear you are probably right, but it _is_ vague. > I wouldn't infer that this > statement extends to DR-DOS or EDR-DOS. Quite. Although I might publish my fixed boot disks and see, anyway. :-) > > As I've learned over time, making up your own license statement like > this can make things unclear later on. I made that mistake once and > I've regretted it. Best to use a license that's already recognized. > But I'm glad that DRDOS made this step; any step forward is good. 100% agreed. > Questions arise when you consider if you can re-use the CP/M source > code in another project that uses a recognized open source license - > or if you want to re-use code from another project (under an open > source license) to improve CP/M. Good point. > Of course, these questions about code > sharing are probably moot anyway, because I'm sure the CP/M source > code is entirely assembly, CP/M was originally implemented in PL/M, a cut-down microcomputer version of PL/I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/M Some parts were hand-coded in assembly. CP/M-68K was originally written in Pascal. Later on, around the Concurrent CP/M-86 era, the OS was rewritten in C, as was CP/M-68K I think. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On Sun, 17 Jul 2022 at 19:35, Travis Siegel 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: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
> On the assumption that DR-DOS is included among the CP/M derivatives, > which would agree with the fact that DRDOS, Inc. did sell DR-DOS 7.xx > (and the shortlived DR-DOS 8.xx) and so had the rights to those, this > means that EDR-DOS is now free! that's a rather far fetched assumption. DR-DOS is as much a CP/M derivative as Windows 11 is a derivative of MSDOS 2.0 OTOH who cares if DR-DOS is more or less free? I don't see the relevance. Tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On 7/17/2022 5:10 PM, Jim Hall wrote: Questions arise when you consider if you can re-use the CP/M source code in another project that uses a recognized open source license - or if you want to re-use code from another project (under an open source license) to improve CP/M. Of course, these questions about code sharing are probably moot anyway, because I'm sure the CP/M source code is entirely assembly, and you don't just simply "copy/paste" assembly code like this from one project into another project. No, there is a large portion of cp/m source that is written in C. Parallax was able to port the cp/m source to run on it's 8-core propeller boards. While the work was (mostly) done by users of the propeller, and not the company itself, it still supported the work, and has links to the work on their site, though I don't have links at the moment, I'd have to go back through the forum posts to find them. Parallax is a company that produces products such as the basic stamp, and the propeller board for use in hobby projects as well as commercial applications. The fact that cp/m runs on the propeller board was a rather big deal at the time that it was completed, because folks had been looking for something they could install and run on the propeller boards themselves to give them an operating system that didn't need to be written from scratch. It was a very popular topic for months on the forums there. I personally never installed cp/m on any of my propeller projects, though I'd considered it a time or two. I had considered building a cp/m propeller project with speech, but decided against it once I realized how much work producing a screen reader for the cp/m os would actually be. Would be great to see something like that though. Perhaps I'll actually tackle that one day, but probably not likely, since working out bugs with screen readers is tough when you depend on that very product to get your feedback. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On 7/17/2022 4:44 PM, C. Masloch wrote: For some reason, I'd thought DRDOS has been free for quite some time. I remember when opendos was released as opensource, (I have a copy of it around here somewhere), but I thought DRDOS was released as freeware sometime after that, though I don't remember where I might have seen that. I do not have a copy of that, though until recently, I did have a copy of original floppy distribution of DRDOS, but that got lost in our most recent move (or perhaps that was novel dos which is essentially opendos now that I think of it). But regardless, I seriously thought DRDOS was already free. I was sure you could download it from their site, unless that was opendos which (afaik) was a later version of DRDOS anyway. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this just me misremembering things? You aren't entirely right. There was the "OpenDOS" release, aka "Caldera OpenDOS Machine Readable Source Kit (M.R.S) 7.01". It was redistributed by the EDR-DOS project at drdosprojects.de (now down but the Wayback Machine has the page [1]). This was "open" in name only though, and not accepted as Open Source by the OSI nor Free Software by the FSF (nor by me). The LICENSE.TXT file in this archive has some choice decisions like these: > LIMITED LICENSE FOR EVALUATION, EDUCATIONAL AND NON-PROFIT USE The details on that indicate you have to belong to a few groups: if (a) you are a student, faculty member or staff member of an educational institution (K-12, junior college, college or library), a staff member of a religious organization, or an employee of an organization which meets Caldera's criteria for a charitable non-profit organization; or (b) your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period for use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasonable period. The "source code grant" section also has wording such as: for personal, non-commercial use. This is not free software because you cannot use, redistribute, and modify it as you wish; you need to limit yourself to personal and noncommercial use, or merely "evaluate" the software. While this doesn't meet the requirements for opensource type of free, your average home user could use the product for free. I do remember having to register your copy after installation, I did that both for myself and for my niece at the time. As far as I know, that was the only requirement for using it as a normal everyday user. Still makes it essentially free for most folks, though I agree that true opensource licenses are considerably better, since they remove the restrictions on use, in case you just happen to take your pc/laptop with you to work, in that case, the first case wouldn't be covered, but the second one would. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the gotchas in that one, I didn't make note of them at the time, since all that mattered is that I could use it for myself without issues. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
> On at 2022-07-17 13:32 -0400, Travis Siegel wrote: > >[..] > > I remember when opendos was released as opensource, (I have a copy of it > > around here somewhere), but I thought DRDOS was released as freeware > > sometime after that, though I don't remember where I might have seen > > that. I do not have a copy of that, though until recently, I did have a > > copy of original floppy distribution of DRDOS, but that got lost in our > > most recent move (or perhaps that was novel dos which is essentially > > opendos now that I think of it). > >[..] > > Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this just me misremembering things? On Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 3:45 PM C. Masloch wrote: > > You aren't entirely right. There was the "OpenDOS" release, aka "Caldera > OpenDOS Machine Readable Source Kit (M.R.S) 7.01". It was redistributed > by the EDR-DOS project at drdosprojects.de (now down but the Wayback > Machine has the page [1]). This was "open" in name only though, and not > accepted as Open Source by the OSI nor Free Software by the FSF (nor by > me). The LICENSE.TXT file in this archive has some choice decisions like > these: > > > LIMITED LICENSE FOR EVALUATION, EDUCATIONAL AND NON-PROFIT USE > [..] Correct. The "OpenDOS" license was a "look but do not touch" license. It put a lot of restrictions on anyone who studied it. It was a very bad license. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 6:57 AM C. Masloch wrote: [..] >> "Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, >> and otherwise >> make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right >> comes from >> the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all >> assets, >> dating back to the mid-1990's. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of >> DRDOS, >> Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in >> interest of >> Digital Research assets." > >On the assumption that DR-DOS is included among the CP/M derivatives, >which would agree with the fact that DRDOS, Inc. did sell DR-DOS 7.xx >(and the shortlived DR-DOS 8.xx) and so had the rights to those, this >means that EDR-DOS is now free! I think it's great that DRDOS updated their statement on CP/M. I would have preferred he used a recognized open source license like MIT or GNU GPL or another license, rather than make his own statement here, but this is definitely a good step forward. Be careful not to carry it too far, though. Bryan's statement is only about CP/M. While he says "and its derivatives," my interpretation is this statement applies only to the CP/M source code, and derivatives from the CP/M source code as it exists now. I wouldn't infer that this statement extends to DR-DOS or EDR-DOS. >As for this being "not a proper FLOSS license", I think it is clear >enough that it allows usage, distribution, and modification, which is >all that is needed for free software. It is true that this is what >people call a "crayon license", but a lot of free-ish DOS software does >have such. I consider this free software. True, a lot of "DOS freeware" does have a statement like this. Note that the GNU GPL 1.0 was published in 1989. (The Open Source Initiative was started in 1998.) But people have been making "DOS freeware" since 1981, seven years before the GNU GPL. So there literally wasn't an "open source" or "Free software" license to use back then. But that's not the case today. There are a lot of good, established, and recognized open source licenses, including BSD, GNU GPL, MIT, Apache 2.0, and others. I think it would have been better for DRDOS to release CP/M under a recognized license (MIT seems to match their intent). As I've learned over time, making up your own license statement like this can make things unclear later on. I made that mistake once and I've regretted it. Best to use a license that's already recognized. But I'm glad that DRDOS made this step; any step forward is good. Questions arise when you consider if you can re-use the CP/M source code in another project that uses a recognized open source license - or if you want to re-use code from another project (under an open source license) to improve CP/M. Of course, these questions about code sharing are probably moot anyway, because I'm sure the CP/M source code is entirely assembly, and you don't just simply "copy/paste" assembly code like this from one project into another project. Jim ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On at 2022-07-17 13:32 -0400, Travis Siegel wrote: On 7/17/2022 7:56 AM, C. Masloch wrote: On the assumption that DR-DOS is included among the CP/M derivatives, which would agree with the fact that DRDOS, Inc. did sell DR-DOS 7.xx (and the shortlived DR-DOS 8.xx) and so had the rights to those, this means tht EDR-DOS is now free! For some reason, I'd thought DRDOS has been free for quite some time. I remember when opendos was released as opensource, (I have a copy of it around here somewhere), but I thought DRDOS was released as freeware sometime after that, though I don't remember where I might have seen that. I do not have a copy of that, though until recently, I did have a copy of original floppy distribution of DRDOS, but that got lost in our most recent move (or perhaps that was novel dos which is essentially opendos now that I think of it). But regardless, I seriously thought DRDOS was already free. I was sure you could download it from their site, unless that was opendos which (afaik) was a later version of DRDOS anyway. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this just me misremembering things? You aren't entirely right. There was the "OpenDOS" release, aka "Caldera OpenDOS Machine Readable Source Kit (M.R.S) 7.01". It was redistributed by the EDR-DOS project at drdosprojects.de (now down but the Wayback Machine has the page [1]). This was "open" in name only though, and not accepted as Open Source by the OSI nor Free Software by the FSF (nor by me). The LICENSE.TXT file in this archive has some choice decisions like these: > LIMITED LICENSE FOR EVALUATION, EDUCATIONAL AND NON-PROFIT USE The details on that indicate you have to belong to a few groups: if (a) you are a student, faculty member or staff member of an educational institution (K-12, junior college, college or library), a staff member of a religious organization, or an employee of an organization which meets Caldera's criteria for a charitable non-profit organization; or (b) your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period for use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasonable period. The "source code grant" section also has wording such as: for personal, non-commercial use. This is not free software because you cannot use, redistribute, and modify it as you wish; you need to limit yourself to personal and noncommercial use, or merely "evaluate" the software. Other than that, DR-DOS 7.02 and 7.03 used to be sold by DRDOS, Inc., and there were partial versions (kernel, maybe shell) numbered as 7.04 and 7.05 used for some embedded jobs. There was also version 8, but due to FreeDOS copyright infringement that had to be changed. The developers at the time chose to completely burn any trace of version 8 instead of complying with the copyleft usage conditions for the included FreeDOS parts. As far as I know, none of these versions were free until now, and beyond that not even just gratis or allowed for noncommercial / personal use. Regards, ecm [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160326184121/http://www.drdosprojects.de/index.cgi/download.htm ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On 7/17/2022 7:56 AM, C. Masloch wrote: On the assumption that DR-DOS is included among the CP/M derivatives, which would agree with the fact that DRDOS, Inc. did sell DR-DOS 7.xx (and the shortlived DR-DOS 8.xx) and so had the rights to those, this means tht EDR-DOS is now free! For some reason, I'd thought DRDOS has been free for quite some time. I remember when opendos was released as opensource, (I have a copy of it around here somewhere), but I thought DRDOS was released as freeware sometime after that, though I don't remember where I might have seen that. I do not have a copy of that, though until recently, I did have a copy of original floppy distribution of DRDOS, but that got lost in our most recent move (or perhaps that was novel dos which is essentially opendos now that I think of it). But regardless, I seriously thought DRDOS was already free. I was sure you could download it from their site, unless that was opendos which (afaik) was a later version of DRDOS anyway. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this just me misremembering things? ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
On at 2022-07-17 13:42 +0200, Liam Proven wrote: I wrote a story about this on the Register: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/cpm_open_source/ Bryan Sparks (president of DRDOS Inc, which is still around) has given official permission for the modification and distribution of "CP/M and derivatives". It's on the Unofficial CP/M Web Site: http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html Since CP/M-86 is a derivative of CP/M, as is DR-DOS, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS and so on, this would seem to be an important legal precedent. No, it is not a proper FOSS license. That takes lawyers and lawyers cost money. But it's the next best thing and I suspect as good as we will ever get. That's great news, thank you! For the record, here is the exact wording that we get. The old wording from the 2001-10-19 email: Let this email represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner the CP/M technology as part of the "Unofficial CP/M Web Site" with its maintainers, developers and community. I further state that as Chairman and CEO of Lineo, Inc. that I have the right to do offer such a license. Lineo and its affiliates, partners and employees make no warranties of any kind with regards to this technology and its usefulness or lack thereof. The new wording in the 2022-07-07 message: Not sure how to "officially" clear this up except to modify the original email content removing the constraint to the website/group that was mentioned. So, perhaps, this will suffice: "Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990's. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets." On the assumption that DR-DOS is included among the CP/M derivatives, which would agree with the fact that DRDOS, Inc. did sell DR-DOS 7.xx (and the shortlived DR-DOS 8.xx) and so had the rights to those, this means that EDR-DOS is now free! As for this being "not a proper FLOSS license", I think it is clear enough that it allows usage, distribution, and modification, which is all that is needed for free software. It is true that this is what people call a "crayon license", but a lot of free-ish DOS software does have such. I consider this free software. Regards, ecm ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] CP/M "and derivatives" legal status clarified
I wrote a story about this on the Register: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/cpm_open_source/ Bryan Sparks (president of DRDOS Inc, which is still around) has given official permission for the modification and distribution of "CP/M and derivatives". It's on the Unofficial CP/M Web Site: http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html Since CP/M-86 is a derivative of CP/M, as is DR-DOS, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS and so on, this would seem to be an important legal precedent. No, it is not a proper FOSS license. That takes lawyers and lawyers cost money. But it's the next best thing and I suspect as good as we will ever get. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
