[GEM Development] GPL question

[John Elliott]

  Does anyone know if the GPL applies to all existing components of Digital
Research GEM, or only those bits which were originally uploaded to Tim
Olmstead's page back in 1999?

  The reason I'm asking is that the existing mirrors of Tim's page don't
contain the GEM release that was made for the BBC Master 512. The drivers
from this are interesting in various respects[*] and it would be nice to
include them in the FreeGEM driver packs I've been doing. The copyright
messages read Digital Research rather than Acorn, so my hope is that they
count as part of DR GEM. About 2% of the code (going by a hasty line count)
seems to be unique to the Acorn drivers.

  (By the way, one of the weirdest drivers I've encountered so far is for
the Apricot F1. It generates code on the fly in order to accelerate drawing
operations.)

[*] Firstly, the copyright date in the Master 512 drivers is 1984, which 
could be as much as two years before the Master 512 itself existed; and the 
internal structure is closest to the drivers supplied with GEM 1.1. This
suggests that they were written for the ABC 300 and updated little if at all
for the Master 512. 
  Secondly there's the whole question of the colour driver, which behaves as
a perfectly sane 4-colour 640x256 driver until the point that the bitmap
gets sent across the Tube. Then DOS Plus (not the driver) squishes it down
to 320x256. The only reason I can think of for such a driver existing at all
is that the ABC 300 or some planned future ABC was intended to have a
640x256x4 mode.

-- 
John Elliott