[GEM Development] GPL question

[Thomas Clayton]

I've been wondering EXACTLY what was released and covered, for some 
time. 

Mind if I listen-in to the answer? ;-)


e.g. I know my copies of Ventura Publisher are NOT covered but ...
(complementary thought lost since I stepped away for ten minutes.)

Tom Clayton
   
--- John Elliott <jce at seasip.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>   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
> _______________________________________________
> gem-dev mailing list
> gem-dev at simpits.org
> http://www.simpits.org/mailman/listinfo/gem-dev
> 



 
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