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Commercial philosophs (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 01.07.2009, 22:52

The problem with bad licenses is that when it gets abandoned or deprecated, no one else can maintain the program. However, that's assuming anyone actually wants to fix or improve it. If it's "free" in every sense of the word but nobody knows how or wants to mess with it, it's all moot anyways.

I don't recall anybody here ever commenting on my MOSS findings, but it was basically a fully GPL DOS extender, fully built using GPL tools, long since abandoned, originally cross-compiled, and free for commercial use (e.g. used for shareware Inner Worlds game, which is now freeware). This was only possible due to the existence of GCC and BinUtils and FreeBSD (for the libc). I can only guess this was partly in reaction to the (at the time) non-commercial EMX license and/or DJGPPv1 needing Turbo C for building some things (e.g. the stub). It wasn't updated since 1996 (!), and since it needed cross compilation, it got left by the wayside. Worse is that it doesn't easily compile anymore (used old tools), uses AT&T (this was well before .intel_syntax), and the existing dynamic (!) compiler binaries are too old to run on modern distros (libc5, heh). And it has a few bugs (LF not translated to CRLF on screen output), quirks (hard or even impossible to bundle data + .EXE, used old/broken bsdboot???), omissions (no mkdir(), lacking some other functionality which obviously wasn't needed for the Inner Worlds game).

It's more or less obsoleted by DJGPPv2 I guess. Still, it bugs me to let software disappear or "die" for no reason. (GCC 3.3.6 was the last to support the MOSS target. My own DJGPP-hosted compile was of GCC 2.95.3.) Ironically, all this and yet I can't name any other program ever using MOSS (no examples included!). And DJGPP isn't exactly updated much anymore either. Nor is FreeDOS. It doesn't mean they're dead, just that people don't use 'em as much, despite GPL (for good or bad). Ironically, DJGPP stuff is easier to use (IMHO) since it doesn't need a billion extra libs just to run one app.

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