on most hated "OS" in the history of computing

[David Gerard]

On 29 March 2010 10:14, Saulius Krasuckas <saulius2 at ar.fi.lt> wrote:
> * On Sun, 28 Mar 2010, Damjan Jovanovic wrote:

>> Out of interest, why were you visiting openwatcom.org? Are you also
>> looking into Win16 tests for Wine?

> Kind of.  I was looking into licensing problems preventing its inclusion
> in Debian.  Seems like I should try starting negotiation between OWC folks
> and Debian-legal experts on slight license changes.


The problem is that the OpenWatcom licence is so unremittingly awful
that debian-legal went "ahahaha, you must be joking" and quickly
dismissed it. It obviously fails the DFSG in a ridiculous number of
ways. Heck, reading it myself I'm reluctant to even *run* the
software.

I'm boggling that the OSI accepted it, given the OSI rules are based
on the Debian rules.

I did email licensing at fsf, who said they may try to negotiate with
Sybase over getting it to actually being a free software licence.
Because it would be an obviously good thing for a good DOS/Win16
compiler to be free software. I don't know if anyone at FSF has
managed to do anything about this, though a legacy environment such as
this is likely not the highest of priorities for a tiny charity of
minimal resources.


- d.