DOS ain't dead

> > BTW, I noticed that this is dual GPL / Artistic. Who even owns the
> > copyright, Tom?
>
> good question, but not important enough to waste too much time ;)

I hate licensing bullcrap, but what good is helping a project that is rejected by the whole world due to silly things like this?

Jim Hall has made it clear that his goal is to have a totally free/libre (four freedoms) "BASE" in FreeDOS. That makes sense for distribution. It's actually pretty close (mostly because almost everything is GPL) but not quite. You may not explicitly care, but as far as sharing, mirroring, or attracting developers (who in modern times are overwhelmingly Linux-biased), it's unavoidable.

And yes, I know huge modifications or related problems at this late date are unlikely, but for clarity, I felt I should mention it.

> > Man, I hate
> > licensing, but just FYI, apparently the "original" 1.0 version is
> > considered "non-free" by the FSF. I know it's pointless, but I would
> > recommend explicitly updating to newer version (Clarified? 2.0?).
>
> this would require reading, understanding, discussing (asking a lawyer?)
> about the terms of the modified license terms.

Why, did you do that for the original?? I'm assuming the FSF's website reflects their own legal attempts, hence if they suggest Clarified is better than 1.0 ("too vague"), it's fair to assume that it is not just hyperbole.

> what a waste of my (and everybody else's) time

Yes, licensing is always a waste of time (IMHO). Nevertheless, because I feel the need to at least "try" to reasonably comply, here's my findings. Feel free to ignore, but at least I tried.

HIMEMX is listed as having three copyright holders: you, Devore, and Japheth. (EDIT: While not listed in the "Author" field, it does also mention Till Gerkin. I should probably fix that.) Japheth (not a maintainer!) says his mods are p.d. (not that such is fully accepted everywhere, Japan??). Devore seems to use Artistic 1.0 in his NoMySo, so presumably he prefers that. But FSF (unlike OSI, yet again) claims 1.0 is too vague and thus non-free. They recommend Clarified (which is almost the same license) or the much newer (but almost twice as complicated) Artistic 2.0. Well, even OSI recommends 2.0 these days. BTW, the whole "dual GPL or Artistic" doesn't seem fully explicit as nowhere can I see any explicit mention of which GPL (v2 only? v2 or newer? v3 or newer?), only LICENSE.TXT (Artistic 1.0), and there is no COPYING nor COPYING3.

I've even discovered that JEMM386 has the same three authors, but there the license seems to be only Artistic 1.0 (and not, as the .LSM erroneously said, 2.0). Oops, I take it back, that is indeed dually licensed (but there is no explicit option for listing dual license in the .LSM backend online, and it only includes Artistic 2.0). Here the .ZIP does include GNU_GPL.TXT (v2, but only? and/or later?) and ARTISTIC.TXT (1.0).

So all it takes (yet again) is one minor nit to prevent people from mirroring (in part or whole) or using even the "BASE" of FreeDOS. Though if you (copyright holder) don't care, I don't see how I can either.


# wc -lwc artistic.*
  112   767  5078 artistic.1
  136  1021  6511 artistic.cla
  172  1368  8655 artistic.2