It is not about if they "will come clean" or not. It is about if they will be forced to do so. There are only a very few people that can apply that force, and that is the people that have contributed code to DOSBox. They are the people that can force Steam to yank DOSBox and find another way to run the games.

In my opinion, they should be forced to by the community that contributed with the development and testing of dosbox. I dont think id/valve should be let off the hook, that would give a carte blanche to everyone else that wants to "incorporate" a gpl program into their for profit venture.

*** Splitted the bashing of Steam and friends into a new thread here: Bashing Valve, Steam and id Software ***

I think by any reasonable interpretation of the GPL, they are still breaking it by using a wrapper around the binary.

Why? Well... well, the GPLv2 does apply to them. There's no question about that by distributing Dosbox with or without source modifications, they have accepted the licence (see section 5)

The next question is whether by putting a wrapper around Dosbox they have broken it. Well, by my interpretation, they have:

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Progra […]
Show full quote

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

It says nothing about /how/ it was made - whether via modifications via the source or otherwise, just about distributing modifications. As such, I think it's pretty clear that by putting a wrapper around Dosbox and distributing the modification requires them to release the source of the wrapper as well, as without the wrapper it doesn't have the same functionality. Ergo, they are still breaking the GPL.

Of course, if the developers are fine with it, nothing can be done, and even if they aren't it's certainly going to be an issue doing anything about it.

halo - how about another scenario?

Say I have developed this incredible compression utility - SuperSquezer (SS), and a freeware SuperUnSquezer (SUS).

SS can make self-excuting compressed archives, but those archives are only useful if you have either SS or SUS installed, since they rely on an uncompressing library distributed with SS and SUS.

Both SS and SUS are closed source, SS costs money, SUS is free.

Would I be allowed to distribute a self-executing, super-squezed version of DOSBox?

Edit: Seems like I found the answer to my own question here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MoneyGuzzlerInc
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLI … oprietarySystem

Im agreeing with halo on this one, even if they just did a wrapper around the dosbox .exe they should include the source code for it, otherwise they're breaching the gpl. It dont matter if the dosbox team doesnt care, the gpl should be upheld.

They just did an update that changes output to ddraw and changes the resolution to avoid the crashes in Vista. Fun, if it didn't mean they overwrote my own conf files 🙁

EDIT: what would be very useful, is to be able to tell Dosbox to use the same resolution full screen as your desktop.

fullresolution=desktop

read the licence Zup, it probably says they dont need to offer tech support... and since dosbox is not modified in any way, it most lilkely gets tech support from these forums.

Not from me it doesn't.

they can just not mention steam in there posts here and you wont know where they got it from 😜

Would be pretty obvious if they couldn't setup their game.....

Speaking of commercial use of DOSBox.... From Ohloh, a site that tries to put a cost on the worth of popular open-source projects:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/124

1Project Cost
2
3This calculator estimates how much it would cost to hire a team to write this project from scratch.
4
5Include         Markup And Code
6Codebase        94,078 Line of Code
7Effort (est.)   24 Person Years
8Avg. Salary     55,000 USD/year
9Project Cost    $1,298,661

I thought Carmack could whip up a DosBox emulator in his sleep? 😉 (Remember reading that or something like it on one of the other forums linked in this thread).

John Carmack is the Chuck Norris of computer gaming.

http://www.idsoftware.com/business/friends/ (bottom of the page) => http://www.idsoftware.com/business/friends/dosbox.php

id Software uses DOSBox emulation for our vintage game titles on Steam.

DOSBox has allowed us to bring classic DOS gaming to modern Windows XP/Vista operating systems, exposing an entire new generation of gamers to the classic back library of id Software.

Well, I'll be damned! Old ID giving proper credits to DOSBox and considering it a friend... Only real shame is that (at least) a small part of their profits should be going to the authors, as that would be a real compliment and a true statement to their talent and hard work.

---EDIT---

After all, if it wasn't for DOSBox, they wouldn't be selling those old games now, would they...? It's because of the work of the authors (and everyone else involved in it's development) that they are actually selling these games again!

p.s. - would anyone be buying any of their old games if they couldn't play them through DOSBox? Personally, I doubt it.

franpa wrote:

read the licence Zup, it probably says they dont need to offer tech support... and since dosbox is not modified in any way, it most lilkely gets tech support from these forums.

DosFreak wrote:

Not from me it doesn't.

And not from Steam or anywhere else it seems 😦

From the SteamPowered forums:

Bad support! A week ago, I bought the game "Commander Keen" via steam. It wasn't running under Windows Vista, so I wrote to the […]
Show full quote

Bad support!
A week ago, I bought the game "Commander Keen" via steam. It wasn't running under Windows Vista, so I wrote to the Steam support.
The answer was:

Hello, […]
Show full quote

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Steam Support.

Technical support for this title is handled by a third party support department - please follow the link below for instructions to contact the support provider for this title:

Please let us know if you encounter any difficulty contacting the support provider for this title, or if you have any further questions.

http://www.idsoftware.com/support/activision/

So, I contacted the ActiVision support from that link. The answer:

Thank you for contacting us. We do not offer support for the download version of the game. You will need to contact Steam as they handle the support for the download version of the game.

😊
So, contacted the Steam support again, waiting for an answer now
That is really annoying, getting no support for a game, I payed money for...

Bless Steam 🙄

You got to laugh at them really. They charge $55 for Bioshock which doesn't even include taxes. Tax in a lot of European countries is about 20% which means you end up paying $66 for a game and you don't even get a box with that! For $45 (a whole $20 less) I can get the game delivered to my door step for free on the day of release.

but you can play it the exact moment it is released though.
That is worth a lot for certain people