Comment Re:On the bright side... (Score 4, Informative) 122
It reduces the chances of tainting freedos since freedos already reverse engineered dos 1.x/2.x era functionality decades ago.
Yes, you're right. The previous source code release of MS-DOS (March 2014, from Microsoft) was under a "look but do not touch" license that said you could only read the source code, but you could not use it elsewhere, and you couldn't apply what you'd learned from the MS-DOS code in other projects. So the FreeDOS Project has been very careful and said several times that if you viewed the MS-DOS source code, you should not contribute to FreeDOS Base because we didn't want to risk tainting the FreeDOS source code. We have a note to that effect on the FreeDOS History page:
"Please note: if you download and study the MS-DOS source code, you should not contribute code to FreeDOS afterwards. We want to avoid any suggestion that FreeDOS has been "tainted" by this proprietary code."
This source code release uses the MIT license (aka Expat license) which is compatible with the GNU GPL. That should mean that people who read this version of the MS-DOS source code can contribute to FreeDOS. (As always, if you've somehow viewed one of the unauthorized source code releases of MS-DOS, you should still not contribute to FreeDOS Base.)
Note: I'm the founder and coordinator of FreeDOS