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> Precedence: bulk > 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy \_ Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225 University of Canterbury, (/' Callsign: ZL3TQE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------