CP/M License Release Update. You can use it in your own projects!

[Scott Chapman]

Hello everyone,

The CP/M release that Bryan Sparks created back in 2001 has been perceived to mean you could not use it in your own projects/distribute it from your own web site.

I contacted Bryan Sparks to get clarification on the release.

This is our email thread. It is duplicated in the PDF file attached.

I have his contact information if any more followup is needed. Please contact me.

Cordially,

Scott Chapman

From: Scott Chapman <sc...@mischko.com>  Jul 6, 2022, 1:42 PM
To: Bryan Sparks <*****@drycanyon.com>

Bryan,

I'm one of the community of people who are playing around with good old CP/M.
I have seen your release letter on the Unofficial CP/M Web Site, which says the following:

"Let this email represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner the CP/M technology as part of the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site' with its maintainers, developers and community."

I am trying to find out what your intent was. Here's the situation:

There is a fellow, David Given, who wrote CPMish (https://github.com/davidgiven/cpmish)
This port of CPM does not use any code from Digital Research, which you released.
I asked David, "Why?". He replied:
"The DR code can only be distributed via the Unofficial CP/M Site (the 'as part of' clause),
which makes it officially Not Free and so cannot be distributed alongside open source software."

The CP/M community needs clarification on what your intent was with this clause:
"as part of the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site' with its maintainers, developers and community".

From reading that, people in the CP/M community believe that you meant for CP/M to be modified but only distributed via that one web site. Can you please clarify?

I will send your reply to the community so we can work with a better understanding.

Sincerely,
Scott Chapman
=====================================================================================
From: Bryan Sparks <*****@drycanyon.com>    Thu, Jul 7, 8:04 AM
To: Scott Chapman <sc...@mischko.com>

Hmmm. Well, what you describe wasn't my intent but I get that this was unclear. It was also some time ago.

Not sure how to "officially" clear this up except to modify the original email content removing the constraint to the website/group that was mentioned. So, perhaps, this will suffice:

"Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990's. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets."

It's a bit clumsy but this may get the intent cleared and authority upon which it is granted.

Thanks for the email.

Bryan

[Scott Chapman]

You're welcome. I tried contacting Bryan a couple years back and never got a reply. This time I found his personal email through Spokeo and he replied the next day.

I'm looking forward to what the CP/M community does with this. 

Happy trails, 

Scott

On Fri, Jul 8, 2022, 1:32 PM David Given <d...@cowlark.com> wrote:

Great news! Thank you so much for doing this! I thought the copyright holders were uncontactable at this point!

I'll get the documentation in my project updated and start looking for useful DR stuff to include. Getting the real DR CCP and BDOS working as an option will be really useful for people with actual 8080s.

[Phillip Stevens]

Scott Chapman wrote:

Hello everyone,

The CP/M release that Bryan Sparks created back in 2001 has been perceived to mean you could not use it in your own projects/distribute it from your own web site.

I contacted Bryan Sparks to get clarification on the release.

This is our email thread. It is duplicated in the PDF file attached.

I have his contact information if any more followup is needed. Please contact me.

Scott,

thanks for sorting out this licencing issue.

I've already updated the licence sections for CP/M-IDE which is used for the RC2014.

I also included the text in the source code of both 8085 and Z80 versions.

But, I slightly modified the PDF before uploading to remove your email address and the remnants of Bryan's too.

I hope that's a small service.

The source I use was originally reversed by Clark Calkins in 1981, but since then many eyes have been over the code to make it more readable.

I've also gone through and made some 8085 and Z80 opcode specific improvements (in different source trees), so it will no longer work unmodified on 8080.

Cheers, Phillip

[David Goodwin]

I wonder if Brian Sparks might be able to do anything to free up DR-DOS too given he apparently still owns it.

Back in the late 90s Caldera made an "open" version of it available as OpenDOS but they only ever released a small part of the source and it was really more of a trial version with the license saying "Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source or binary form free of charge if your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period for use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasonable period."

The last version of DR-DOS for desktop use was 7.03 released in January 1999 and the last for embedded use was 8.0 released in March 2004. And I guess its been impossible to buy licenses since at least 2018 when the website went offline.

I'm also curious what the situation with Personal NetWare was. I assume when Caldera bought all the Digital Research stuff off of Novell they never got ownership of or the source code to Personal Netware but they clearly had some right to redistribute it without paying royalties (it was available with the "free" downloadable version of OpenDOS/DR-DOS). Perhaps if whatever those rights were followed the Digital Research copyrights to Brian Sparks then Personal Netware could be made available again in some form too.