It's fair to point out licensing concerns like these.

One thing to emphasize here is that the GPL is a license that makes sense for source code, and isn't very suitable for protected artwork and game assets such as pictures, videos, music, sound effects and 3D models. And I don't think the GPL necessarily prohibits software from being distributed along with assets that are licensed differently, since the code isn't technically "linked" with them. But I too am not a legal expert.

That being said, I was also surprised to see that Tetris Queen game being bundled in the FreeDOS distribution. You could argue that the project is maintained by volunteers with limited time and resources to curate and scrutinize all these contributed applications and games, but the license and copyright issue in that game in particular are indeed pretty blatant.

They should definitely take user reports with such concerns seriously.

In my experience, the FreeDOS mailing lists are the best way to reach out to the FreeDOS maintainers. Have you tried raising the issue there?

eM-!3 wrote on 2026-05-19, 11:27:

When FreeDOS 1.4 was released I took a closer look at their distro and discovered that graphics in one of the games are taken st […]
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When FreeDOS 1.4 was released I took a closer look at their distro and discovered that graphics in one of the games are taken straight from Microsoft's old cards.dll. Game name is Bolitaire and they released it as GPL2 with absolutely no credits to the person who made them: "card pictures : I got it from the internet.". Yup, downloaded from the internet so it must be legit and totally free and they can put it now under freaking GPL2. Original graphics were made by well known pixel artist Susan Kare and are still part of some new commercial products.

Normally I don't care much about US licenses but this time it's a joke because they try to pretend to be pure. I took my time to go to their gitlab and sent there a message but they are not bothered as they didn't react at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they have many more mistakes like this.

BTW, do any of you remember raging war of FreeDOS project and it's pitiful maintainer against Richard Stallman? Yes, they were part of infamous anti RMS letter.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/fr … .8/image_0.html
https://kare.com/microsoft/
https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

do i blame rms, sure hes ruined my mind because if i had never knew about the gnu gpl i wouldnt have seen a fragmented landscape. you got microsoft and valve doing nothing while libreoffice and onlyoffice have battles over soverignty.

i try to use libre software but i come back to windows because im stupid and want to be ignorant like i was as a kid just see microsoft as my parents and they take care of the world for me.

trying to fit an ideology in a license backfired on me because its made me paranoid and stubborn trying to change things i have no power. Ive come to expect free as in free maintenance for free software, you dont own it in a physical sense its a license but you are saddled with maintaining it for eternity like a property

digger wrote on Yesterday, 21:28:

One thing to emphasize here is that the GPL is a license that makes sense for source code, and isn't very suitable for protected artwork and game assets such as pictures, videos, music, sound effects and 3D models.

For new assets I think it could be done to encourage maintenance and also even be reproducable via script. Like Blender could output images and models if you use a .py script to direct Blender to run exporters, or a batch to make it render to certain png files and go from there. SoX can deal with creating sound effects from scratch. There's been opportunities for ages to do things this way that no one's really tried, and the GPL could apply to data this way.