Hi Sorin,
> I am kind of new to freedos operating system and I want to know if it
> is ok to deliver it installed on assambled computers we deliver to a
> customer.
In short yes - it is free software. You may want to look at
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=Install
for some known issues of the 1.0 CD-ROM ISO or use one of
the more up to date floppy image distros or wait for the
next version of the ISO.
> Where can I find the license statement ?
You can find it on the ISO images and on your disk after you
install FreeDOS, but I agree that we should put more details
about licensing on a suitable easy to find place on the main
freedos.org homepage...
http://SF.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=Main_Page#License
says that under the GPL (we often use version 2 of that license)
as long as some rules are followed. Nothing evil, but good to know:
> Anyone may sell a GPL’d operating system (such as FreeDOS) so long as
> there is a distinction made as to what the customer is actually
> buying. That is, it must be made clear that the distributor is not
> claiming that they own or wrote the GPL program, and that they don’t
> reserve any rights to it.
>
> Additionally, the distributor must understand that any changes they
> make are to be identified and must be released freely. For example,
> if someone adds FAT32 support into the FreeDOS kernel, then it falls
> under GPL and must be freely available. However, if they add FAT32
> support as a TSR and simply bundle it with the rest of FreeDOS, then
> they can charge for that piece of code only.
>
> The idea is to protect the free software and their authors. No one
> else should be able to take their code and misrepresent it, or worse,
> illegally or unethically profit from it.
So in short, if you do not modify the source code, you can
distribute FreeDOS with your computers as long as you make
clear that it is FreeDOS (which is a trademark of Jim Hall
by the way) and who wrote it (in practice, this could for
example mean that you keep the LSM files and documentation
text files around which tell about those things for each
of the components of FreeDOS). You can even bundle FreeDOS
with your own software, even if it is commercial or closed
source, as long as it stays clear what is what / by whom.
Note that the FAT32 example above is hypothetical because
FreeDOS already contains FAT32 support anyway. Replace the
word "FAT32 support" by "speech recognition" if you want ;-)
An interesting page on freedos.org is the software list:
http://www.freedos.org/software/ for example in BASE you
can see that http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=base is
almost completely GNU GPL, while JEMM386 uses the artistic
license.
An important detail of the GPL (license) is that you have
to give all people who get the software (in your case, all
people who buy your computers) an easy way to get the full
source code of exactly the same version of FreeDOS which
you installed on your computers. The easiest way to do it
is to give them a CD-ROM with the sources, because you can
use the ISO image with-source versions from our homepage.
You should NOT just make a link to our homepage, because
we may change the contents from time to time and of course
if you have many customers who download the source codes
from us, it would use a lot of our bandwidth ;-) This is
one aspect where the Artistic License differs from GPL:
For JEMM386, it would be enough to just say that you use
version X.Y of JEMM386 from a certain URL, because JEMM386
uses the Artistic License which is more relaxed with this.
Of course this is just trying to sketch the meaning of the
licenses of FreeDOS. I am no expert for licenses, so other
people on this mailing list can give better answers. You
can also read Wikipedia about GPL GNU public license here:
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licen%C8%9Ba_Public%C4%83_General%C4%83_GNU
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_%28licen%C8%9B%C4%83,_versiunea_2%29
I hope this helps :-)
Regards, Eric
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