Date:	Tue, 23 Sep 1997 11:31:31 +1200
From:	physmsa AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz (Mr M S Aitchison)
Subject:	GPL or not (was Re: For Sale or For Free: The Debate...)
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Cc:	patv AT iop DOT com, tbird AT caldera DOT com
Message-id:	<199709222331.LAA07648@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>

>  cooperation between the two efforts... lack of GPL 

Okay, I have a bunch of programs for OpenDOS or FreeDOS that I want to
contribute.  I want people to be able to distribute them for free, and
give the public access to the sources so long as they also make any
derived versions as free and open as the originals.  These programs
happen to work with any DOS (incl W95 DOS) but will use fancy features
of OpenDOS when possible.  I am happy for Caldera to distribute them
with OpenDOS (in fact some are "plug in replacements" for external
(Open/Free)DOS commands, and even for them to charge money (like Linux
distributors do with Linux). But I wouldn't want anybody else to be
able to turn around and say they are their own programs and restrict
distribution simply because they edit the code a bit.  

I'd like some sort of license agreement that everybody can be happy
with.  I know there are problems for Caldera with the GPL restrictions,
and Tim Bird has suggested something a while back that sounded like a
good compromise.

Can any of you come up with something good for programs like mine,
written from scratch without any Caldera/DRDOS sources, that satisfies
everybody?  If this can be sorted out then the question over
distributing Caldera-owned utility sources will be reduced to just a
few programs that I/we cannot reasonably tackle, such as EMM386 and
TASKMGR.

Summary of points I'd want to see:

 (1) You can distribute the programs unmodified (that means the conditions
     of distribution has to be there, unmodified),
 (2) You can modify and distribute the software so long as the new version
     is just as free as the original, including sources!
 (3) You can make a commercial product out of it (possibly meaning some
     secret changes to the sources) only by asking the author(s) to let
     you do something outside the normal conditions.

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Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy   \_  Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225
University of Canterbury,             </  Fax   : +64 3 3642-469  or  3642-999
Christchurch, New Zealand.           /)   E-mail: phys169 AT csc DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz
#include <disclaimer.std>           (/'   Callsign: ZL3TQE
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