Re: MSDOS support

[Yavor Doganov]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Some small parts of FreeDOS are proprietary, but the system cannot
> > work without them
> 
> Which ones are those?

I don't know, I vaguely remember one of them was an essential driver.

3 or 4 years ago I attended a conference and there was a speech by one
of the FreeDOS core developers.  I asked him whether the system is
100% free so that I could install it on my 286 and 8088 machines.  He
said that some parts (he named them precisely, I just can't remember)
are non-free and there are both legal and technical problems that
prevent their replacement.

It appears there is some truth in this, because the link at gnu.org
was removed last year:

RCS file: /web/www/www/links/links.html,v
[...]
revision 1.131
date: 2007-09-11 02:27:23 +0300;  author: karl;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -3;  
commitid: qaxpOznA3ziwifxs;
freedos contains nonfree software, confirmed by rms, ticket 340566