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Debian/OW ... FASM (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 12.09.2010, 02:40

> Sure, that's the reason, but it's bogus. [Blah]
It's bogus if you look at it from a practical viewpoint. It's not if you understand that it's a political/philosophical reason. (And though I understand them that way, I don't share their opinion.)

> Bah, such a mess, even if OSI approved (heh).
That's the fundamental difference between OSI and FSF.

> The real problem is that nothing else (more free) can build FreeDOS,
> so beggars can't be choosers.
It's Write-your-own-compiler day! If anyone cares enough about Debian.

> P.S. I personally think FASM is plenty free.
It's free - even as far as the FSF is concerned - but it's more restrictive than the actual (2- or 3-clause) BSD license. It's also a practical disadvantage to re-use the text of some other license then append a sloppy Copyleft restriction to that, this just confuses people more than an entirely (or at least, obviously visibly) custom license would have. (I won't dare suggesting to just use the GPL if you want Copyleft, heh. Ridiculous, what!)

> Sure, you can't GPL it, but
> you couldn't realistically do that anyways with other licenses (except as a
> whole, which really only affects your own changes).
What? You can GPL any 2- or 3-clause BSD licensed program all you like. (Sure, it's misconduct, but you're legally allowed to.) I don't understand what you say inside the parentheses at all.

> Besides, nobody
> needs or wants to do so with FASM, and it's already been used commercially
> in many places, so it's "moot".
It's partly a question of your philosophy (i.e. the source code is free and its freedom is "defended" (Copyleft), or the user is free), but then it's also that I feel cheated reading a 2-clause BSD license and then some lazy Copyleft notice. It's like the Sybase license thing all over again.

I also don't know why Tomasz detests the (L)GPL (alternatively, with a linking exception) like that.

> I guess it's more of a "don't pretend you wrote it" clause than anything,
> so people can not be confused by different licensed derivatives.
Why? All derivatives of BSD licensed software need to reproduce the copyright notice in the source code, documentation and other material anyway.

> And Japheth is right, it lacks OMF, but so does DJGPP.
DJGPP is a toolchain primarily intended for C development of 32-bit DPMI programs. FASM is an assembler that ostensibly supports 16-bit DOS targets. Do you see the difference? (Yes, there's an OMF 32-bit format but you don't need that for DPMI development with DJGPP because DJGPP gives you the whole toolchain for COFF anyway and 32-bit OMF isn't that widely used.)

> Besides, there are already tons of existing tools that handle that,
> so adding it to FASM wouldn't hurt but isn't a priority.
Particularly, you cannot link 16-bit DOS programs consisting of separate modules (possible created by different assemblers or compilers) with any FASM source code because the OMF format is just the 16-bit DOS object format. I mean, come on. Acceptable OMF support is even implemented in NASM, and it's so free you can just copy or adapt its code (even for "proprietary" Copyleft licensed software such as FASM).

(Okay, please just tell me you did not say the "tons of existing tools" are the reason OMF doesn't have priority for 16-bit DOS support. Because if you did say so, I would have to answer that precisely they are the reason OMF does have some priority for 16-bit DOS support.)

---
l

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