Simh is not longer a FOSS project

[wfjm]

The Wikipedia definition of FOSS reads

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is both free software and open-source software[a] where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.

The new LICENSE.txt states

Any use of this codebase that changes the code to influence the behavior of
the disk access activities provided by sim_disk.c and scp.c is free to do
that as long as anyone doing this is explicitly not licensed to any subsequent
changes to any part of the codebase made by Mark Pizzolato after the
LICENSE.txt was added to the repository.

This clearly violates the FOSS concept of "where anyone is freely licensed ... to change the software in any way".
It declares two files as closed source, and effectively disallows forks in the future.

Commit ce2adce claims to solve issue #1028, which originated partially from problems to include newer SimH versions in distributions like Debian or Ubuntu. With this LICENSE.txt, which is partially closed source and certainly not FOSS, it is obvious that SimH can't be included in Debian. So the commit solves #1028, but in a destructive way.

[markpizz]

There is no way that I care about Debian support since the Debian simh support is still packaging simh v3.8-1 from 11 years ago which it somehow managed to package without any project wide license declaration.

The code at the head of the master branch of the repo is indeed now NOT fully compliant with the definition of FOSS.

However, as long as you don't "need" or otherwise actually change the mentioned functionality in the LICENSE.txt file, you are free to do anything with the what's there.

If you have such a "need", you (or anyone) is free to use everything in the repo prior to commit ce2adce.

From my point of view, the original packaging by Debian and other Linux distro's was mostly a teaser concept that got folks simulator binaries that didn't do anything without some deep digging for various pieces elsewhere. Those digging efforts generally brought folks to the simh.trailing-edge.com web site and/or this repo. After which they were easily able to pick up and build newer v3 or v4 versions of the one or two simulators they actually cared about.

[masinter]

Consider GitHub advice on choosing a license
and GitHub's Terms of Service.

[wfjm]

@masinter : in an ideal world one picks a license, BSD, MIT, GPL, adds the full license text at the top of repo, and uses only a one-line SPDX license disclaimer in each file.

Using SPDX disclaimers has many advantages, keeps clutter out of the sources, can be easily scanned, etc. The Linux kernel when through this for version 5.2 ( see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

But in simh/simh we are very far away from an ideal world.

[masinter]

The GitHub advice on choosing a license contains:

"Note: If you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, according to the Terms of Service, other users of GitHub.com have the right to view and fork your repository."

It seems that there are some constraints on license terms for public GitHub repositories.

Another resource to consider is GitHub Community Guidelines.

[wfjm]

See the post Announcing the Open SIMH project. A new repository open-simh/simh was setup and provides the SimH code-base under an MIT-style licence, see open-simh LICENSE.txt.

This issue is therefore in the state:

• WON'T FIX in simh/simh
• FIXED in open-simh/simh

And needless to say: I've unwatched, unstared and unforked simh/simh and will follow open-simh/simh.