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
