2Roderick Klein:
> Well one thing that is easier about ArcaOS and putting in drivers the user data is that you no longer have to deal with license number you have to enter. Having worked (note I no longer work @Mensys) on eCS the license key was not working to bad. But for some people it was a not that easy to enter the 40 or so character registration key in the installer.
eCS license key can be picked up from the hard disk or flash stick, so you never need to enter it manually. Branding the user name in some binaries is needed solely for copy protection. Also, it seems that user name is encrypted. So, this is obviously not for the purpose of making user's life easy. It's needed because user will be shy to share his drivers with anybody else, because copy owner's name is can be seen easily during the boot.
> As for your statement that 16 and 32 bit driver library is closed source most likely duo to the DDK license.
In this file Drv16-20161010.zip (download here
https://88watts.net/software.html) is a readme file:
> "The Drv16 Kit is a derivative work of the IBM DDK. You must have a IBM"
DDK license to use this software.
Anyway for the the 32 bit and 16 bit driver they have a library and a presentation on how to write drivers:
http://www.warpstock.eu/images/2015/presentations/David_Azarewicz-WSE2015_Writing_Device_Drivers.pd> Anyway again it might be the age old problem this caused the orginally IBM DDK license.
DRV16 and DRV32 are _closed_source_. DANIS506 and AHCI are licensed as GPL/LGPL, so they cannot be combined with closed source parts. All modifications to GPL code should be published in source form. DDK license does not mean that the source code should be closed. IBM published DDK for developer's convenience. DDK license does not contain any restrictions. Moreover, IBM didn't put any license into DDK. So, it is published "as is", but without any restrictions. Yes, no license was put into DDK. There are some copyright notices in headers/sources, but IBM simply forgot to put a license there.
> As for your last statement that Arca Noae picked FreeBSD so they do not have to make the source code public.
They had a different reason, a technicall on. When I worked with David Azarewicz at Mensys on eCS the Wireless NIC driver based on Linux sources ended up being dead. Why ? The Linux guys had made such many changes to the sources you could no longer recompile the sources.
Yes, Linux driver sources change continuously together with Linux kernel version. They make changes into kernel interfaces constantly. So, e.g., UNIAUD32 sources must adapt to each Linux kernel version constantly. FreeBSD has much stable kernel interfaces. This is one of the reasons, but not the main one. The main reason is that BSD license allows to not publish the sources. This allows to make the OS/2 community dependent from them.