This is excellent news! It's great that he has released this under the GNU GPL. I did a quick review, and I think these are the only issues I found:
Issue 1. Bob needs to take the extra step to review his comments in his code, to make sure this doesn't conflict with the GNU GPL. For example, I did a little poking around and found source files like this: https://github.com/sudleyplace/386MAX/blob/main/386MAX/LOADALL.INC At the top of that file, we have: ;' $Header: P:/PVCS/MAX/386MAX/LOADALL.INV 1.0 11 Aug 1995 10:56:06 HENRY $ ; ; (C) Copyright 1987-92 Qualitas, Inc. All rights reserved. ; ; LOADALL.INC ; ; 286 LOADALL and 386 LOADALL structures ; The "(C) Copyright 1987-92 Qualitas, Inc" is fine. I'd recommend that this get updated to "1987-92, 2022" to represent that the code was also released in 2022. And it would probably be best for Bob to put his name in there somewhere, to indicate he has the rights to release this as GNU GPL. (Maybe Bob would be willing to copy/paste his comment from https://github.com/sudleyplace/DPMIONE/issues/3#issuecomment-1172710414 into a README file in the GitHub project? That would probably get to the same place.) But as it is, that should be okay. (IANAL) But the "All rights reserved" is a problem. This is incompatible with the GNU GPL. At best, it is confusing. But this really needs to get cleaned up before we can include it in FreeDOS. (Note we had the same "All rights reserved" issue with FDNET's Crynwr network drivers a while ago. That issue was resolved when Russel later confirmed the extra "All rights reserved" statements were added by an automated process.[*1]) Issue 2. Bob should also review his GitHub project to ensure that every binary file included there has source code for it somewhere. For example, https://github.com/sudleyplace/386MAX/tree/main/CYADISK seems to be nothing but DLL and EXE files. I think the source is in https://github.com/sudleyplace/386MAX/tree/main/CYASETUP but I'm not sure. In general, if there's no source code for something, Bob should consider removing that from the tree. I think those are the only issues I found in doing a quick review of Bob's GitHub project. In the meantime, I'll post a news item about it on the website and tweet about it from our Twitter account. Jim [*1] I just realized that Russel's email gave me permission to update the Crynwr network source code files on Ibiblio and I haven't done that yet, so I'll do it this weekend On Fri, Jul 1, 2022 at 5:03 PM Volkert via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello FreeDOS developer community! > > Bob Smith of Sudley Place Software has released the source code of > 386MAX and related tools under the GPLv3 license! > > He'd like this news to be passed on to whomever would be > interested in this source code, but he does add that the project > has little to no documentation available. See his comment at > https://github.com/sudleyplace/DPMIONE/issues/3#issuecomment-1172710414 > > The reason why this is of particular importance to the FreeDOS project, > is because it provides the following two features that JEMM currenty > lacks: > > 386MAX supports the Global EMM Import Specification (GEMMIS), which > allows Windows 3.x to start in 386 Enhanced mode, even when the EMM > manager is loaded. (The documentation in the 386MAX source code seems to > refer to it as the "Global Paging Import Spec".) 386MAX supports the > same I/O port trapping API through INT 2fh that EMM386 provides. This > (at least in theory) should make it compatible with certain emulation > TSRs such as SoftMPU and VSB, which currently don't support JEMM, > and would require separate non-trivial ports to work with JEMM's > JLOAD feature. > > > Anyway, the code is available at https://github.com/sudleyplace/386MAX > > I would very much like to see 386MAX included in the FreeDOS > distribution, with the option for users to choose between it and JEMM. > > It seems that the assembly code requires MASM, so I guess the first > step would be to try getting it to build with WASM or JWASM. > > Who's up for helping me get this ready for inclusion with FreeDOS? _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
