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MSDOS 4.0 (Announce)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 27.04.2024, 15:25

> > Can you point me to the source code for the latter?
>
> v4.0-ozzie is the multitask one, but it doesn't come with everything.
Well I can't maintain it if I don't have the source code.

But I might be able to do sufficient analysis of it to
add the minimal NE functionality I would need, to the
standard 4.0 sources.

And technically I don't even need that - I could have
an entirely different scheme.

I mainly need a (potentially) slightly different scheme -
I need a way of getting the environment variables without
needing to inspect the stack on entry.

So even though there is no PSP, I need to be able to
retrieve a fake PSP - or some other method.

Or I can just code a new function code.

Also I noticed that this has things like DosWrite().
This is basically an early incarnation of OS/2 - and
one that looks better to me - ie it doesn't use the
ULONG etc.

And it has a DosFindFirst() as well, that uses the DTA
in a complex way which I wasn't able to decipher.

Also, the permissive license means that another thing
comes into view - HX. If MSDOS 4.0 is married up with
HX - perhaps even incorporating the hxldr32, we basically
get a Win32 system.

The license isn't visible on the source tree here:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX/tree/master

This says very little:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX/blob/master/HXsrc.txt

5. License

The HX DOS extender is freeware. Copyright 1996-2020 Japheth.

Japheth


If you sniff around further you find:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX/blob/master/Src/HXLDR32/HXLDR32.TXT

It's unclear how widely that applies, but it says:

6. Copyright

HXLdr32 is part of HX DOS extender. This extender is freeware.
View HXRT.TXT for licence details.

Japheth


That file - HXRT.TXT - is not included in the above source tree,
but if you download HXRT221.zip you can see it, and it has more
verbiage:



8. License

The HX DOS extender runtime is freeware and may be used for any purpose.
Copyright Japheth 1996-2022. The HX runtime can be freely distributed
with any application.

Japheth


Which is basically unrestricted as I see it.

The MIT license for MSDOS 4.0 says:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.


I don't see anything requiring source code to be published
in either of those things.

Which means the traditional closed source model for commercial
(viable) software could be used.

So some of us here could potentially start a company.

I'm more interested in getting it to the point where
that would be feasible, rather than getting involved
in administering a business.

One other thing that could be important is incorporating
DOSLFN - not sure what the license on that is, or whether -
if it is restrictive - there is some competitor.

BFN. Paul.

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