crazii wrote on 2023-02-27, 07:37:
The author of MPXPlay agreed that SBEMU uses its source code, as long as its header comments unchanged, and SBEMU opens source. 😁
https://sourceforge.net/p/mpxplay/discussion/ … ead/ac6560662b/
Good to know that the Mpxplay author doesn't object to their sound driver sources being used in SBEMU, but didn't you also integrate Sound Blaster emulation code from the DOSBox project? That code is likely licensed under the GPL, which doesn't allow it to be mixed with sources that have a more restrictive license. "You can't use this to make a clone of certain other software" is an additional restriction that the GPL doesn't have, and therefore make DOSBox sources and Mpxplay sources incompatible with one and other.
As long as the DOSBox developers don't mind this, I guess you could at least continue developing it further like this for the time being, but they legally have a right to object to this.
I would still recommend replacing the sound hardware driver sources from Mpxplay with alternative sources with a more permissive license.
The Open Sound System (OSS) driver sources from 4Front Technologies would fit the bill: they have been released under multiple open sources licenses, including 2-Clause BSD and GPL 2.0, and support a wide range of contemporary sound devices, including pretty much all the popular ones: Intel HDA, ICHx AC'97, Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy, and many others. The OSS drivers are multi-platform in the sense that they are intended for POSIX (UNIX-like) operating systems, but could perhaps be ported to DOS. Such a port would yield benefits not just for SBEMU, but for many other open source DOS sound projects as well.
I would guess that one major piece of "glue" that such a DOS port would require would be the PCI access stuff, so implementations of "pci.h" and such. That could perhaps be adapted from other open source DOS projects.
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a bit pedantic when it comes to open source licenses and compliance and such, but open source projects have gotten in trouble over these things, and SBEMU is too cool to have it blocked or complicated by something like this.