| Connect jimfhall
Minnesota
Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
Authored Comments
Yes, in the past we've had to turn away a few contributors because they had downloaded and studied the MS-DOS source code that was posted on the Computer History Museum website. That's because the Museum license did not allow you to re-use the code in other projects.
My understanding from lawyers who have explained it to me (I am not a lawyer) is that you can be "tainted" by knowledge of proprietary source code, under US law and under similar laws agreed to by partner countries. So anyone who read or studied the source code to MS-DOS as it was previously released via the Computer History Museum license was not allowed to contribute to FreeDOS afterwards. We posted several notices to this effect on the FreeDOS website and elsewhere.
With this source code release from Microsoft, however, that problem goes away. This source code release of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 uses the MIT License, which is not only a recognized open source software license, but compatible with the GNU GPL. This means the "taint" concern is effectively lifted.
The first time I submitted a patch back to a maintainer was around 1995 on GNU Emacs. I had started work at a small company, and our workstations were Apollo DomainOS/AEGIS. I didn't like the Apollo editor pad, so I downloaded the source code to GNU Emacs and tried to compile it. The build process broke somewhere, but I managed to work around it with one or two lines of code.
I submitted my changes back to GNU Emacs, and they made it in. I felt really proud knowing I'd helped in some small way.