The GPL, if that's what you're thinking of, allows unrestricted use of all the application binaries by anybody. Non-software businesses are not going to invoke the GPL source software issue, where anybody that
*distributes* software compiled from modified GPL source must also publish the derived source code.
in layman's terms, the Commercial use clause means you cant distribute or embed the software in a product you sell.
& if you did produce a product that needed a DB back-end it would still be fine if the end user installed the DB service themselveslooks like you are reasonably well prepared for the disaster when it happens if you choose a desktop manager like XFCE or LXDE rather than gnome3 you wont scare the new users too much either (if they even notice)
-- It's fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour! -- Macy's
The problem there is that a lot of the software on small mainframes was written in something that was not even slightly portable (assembler) or at best semi-portable (one of the RPG dialects (IBM), FIND-2 or Filetab (ICL 1900)). Worse yet, and I've seen this in live use, is an assembler program that doesn't correspond to its source because it was hand-patched to fix a bug and then saved to disk or tape to become the production version.
Stuff that is written in even quite an early version of FORTRAN will, I believe, often compile with a current compiler. COBOL typically won't compile without changes to its environment division but, especially if it doesn't use any of the more idiosyncratic COMP-n data types some dialects used, may not need much alteration to compile with MicroFocus COBOL. That will let it run on any system that supports the Java JVM.
-- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
Actually, you can, and without publishing anything if you haven't modified the source code. If you did modify the code, then provided you publish the derived source, you can sell a product containing it.
The GPL is a bit more liberal than you think. Provided the source code and any derivations are kept open, then you can make money from it. This is why it's said that you should think of the GPL being "free" as in "free speech", not "free beer".
Hmmm. Dunno, really. I think he should be aiming for something that can be fixed at the drop of a hat by a bloke from the local computer repair shop, since he's not likely to be around all the time to help out. Windows 7 is probably the "sweet spot" OS for that at the moment. So if the W95 stuff runs on that, which it probably will with minor tweaks, then I'd have thought that would be appreciated more by the users.
Interesting that you mention that, as the "assembler" that was running on those old IBM 360 machines was also very much like what the Java JVM is now. The 360 machine language was in fact a portable instruction set that was interpreted by microcode, and the amount of hardware that was doing the real work depended on the size of the machine. A small machine would do a lot in microcode, a larger machine may do more in hardware and thus was faster. But they were running the same machine instructions, so the assembler source really was portable. Between systems of the same line, of course. But that is like Java bytecode being portable between systems running the JVM.
With anything from Win3.1 to Windows XP, you can just put the hard drive in a USB caddy, plug it in to a modern machine and create a Virtual Box (free) VM to run it up just as good as it was in yesteryear.
Better still you can copy contents of the drive in to a file on the new machine, so you can then dispense with a rickety old drive which is many times over its expected lifetime by now.
I've done it with half a dozen old machines belonging to relatives. So they can look through their old systems to see if there is anything useful on there, long after the old hardware has been disposed of.
But what has this got to do with the Pi again?
---druck
That was my point: when you consider all the sins of omission back in the day:
- I've worked in shops where the systems analysts binned all their documentation as soon as a job (new development or change request) was complete
- everybody who was in the business then knows that hand-written or typed system documentation NEVER got updated as requirements changed or commission:
- not updating source after applying a binary patch
- binning the master card deck without checking that there was a copy on tape or disk.
it can become almost impossible to to maintain a system written in assembler, let alone re-implement it in a machine-independent language so it can be ported to different hardware.
That's one of the prime reasons that the banks, which used to use S/360 systems, are now on System/Z and still running the same decades old, incompletely documented systems that nobody fully understands and are crapping themselves in case Ginny can't pull Big Blue out of its current death spiral.
-- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
Yes if youd did modify the code, you do not need to *publicly* publish it. You need to make it available to the *customers/users*, *not* the whole world.
Hmm. That means that you could actually put GPL source code on a website behind a paywall, available only to customers of the product, or for people that paid for the code. Of course, anybody that got hold of the code could then publish it elsewhere.
Yes it does. This is how AdaCore makes money. They enhance/contibute to gcc' Ada frontend, and relase a gpl'd version once a year, with gpl'd runtime. That makes the OUTCOME of the compiler gpl.
In order to avoid that, you pay support to them, and you get a semi-closed gcc. The one they have enhanched, which they merge back most of to the upstream gcc a couple of years later.
You - as a paying customer - get the enhanced source. But it is not publicly released.
And some of the fixes they do will not make it to the fsf gcc. Like if they judge the nature of the so it may compromise a customers system.
And it all fits into gpl.
I was not revering to GPL code but code whose licence specificly excludes commercial use (I believe that the Mysql licence amongst others has this restriction).
-- Has everybody got HALVAH spread all over their ANKLES?? ... Now, it's time to "HAVE A NAGEELA"!!
MySQL is dual-licenced, GPL and a commercial licence (for the distributors of commercial applications that do not wish to use the GPL). That's possible where a single person or company holds the copyright because the GPL is not an exclusive licence. The MySQL that comes with Linux distros is GPL licenced and can also be used commercially, and the GPL source-code issues mentioned elsewhere in this thread are of no relevance to the end-users.
...
You can run Windows 95 in a VM on a Raspberry Pi.
In fact that's not an entirely silly way to do it...
Theo
Thinking about it, yes, it is retro-computing, similar to the old 1980s home-computer emulators that can also run on the Pi. Given that the games being emulated for Win95 there might typically have been run on a 66MHz Pentium P5, then a speedup would be expected, even when emulating the different CPU instruction set.
An emulator rather than a virtual machine.
Reminds me of running Window's 95 in a window under RISC OS. Not a VM either, but a hardware second processor in the Risc PC.
---druck
The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) specifically prohibit packages in the main repository from having those sorts of restrictions. As long as you don't enable the contrib or non-free sections, you can run a Debian system anywhere, for any reason, without running afoul of licensing issues. That's a big piece of why Valve uses Debian as the base for SteamOS.
Jon
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