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In May 2022, the MIT License of SIMH version 4 on GitHub was unilaterally modified by a contributor to make it non-free, by adding a clause that revokes the right to use any subsequent revisions of the software containing their contributions if modifications that “influence the behaviour of the disk access activities” are made.

wha

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@chjara https://github.com/simh/simh/commit/ce2adce632e1a22e6d76d4bf726d6b863373c550

>Additionally, the following restrictions on the use of this software apply.

>Any use of this codebase that changes the code to influence the behavior of the disk access activities is free to do that as long as anyone doing this is explicitly not licensed to any subsequent changes to any part of the
codebase made by Mark Pizzolato after that functionality was implemented by Mark Pizzolato. Changes that qualify for this restriction at least include: changing the behavior or default of SET AUTOSIZE/NOAUTOSIZE, or any code in sim_disk.c or any simulator components that use the sim_disk routines.

akko_what
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@novenary apparently it’s because someone chris hanson forked simh to remove that disk access feature, pizzolato took it personally and changed the license specifically to disallow that, and then also went on a tantrum in general when people were inquiring about it and asking to have their contribution removed (since they didn’t agree to the license change) etc

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@novenary wait it gets better
the feature he’s specifically so picky about, “autosizing”
apparently it’s that simh will add a bunch of data for the sake of verification after disk images
and that broke a lot of stuff
in reaction to people complaining about it, he decided to make removing that feature illegal
lmao

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@chjara @novenary except you can still modify the old code in that way 😂

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@chjara lmao imagine making free software and then seething so hard at users exercising their freedoms that you make it non-free
this guy definitely has more than a few screws loose
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