Enhanced Dr-DOS

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Enhanced Dr-DOS is a patch kit to update release 7.01 of OpenDOS, a derivative of DR-DOS made available as source code by Caldera in 1996.

The licence terms of this release were incompatible with most if not all existing open source licences, and not surprisingly Caldera did not get the developer response that they hoped for. Later releases of OpenDOS remain closed source, and eventually Caldera returned to describing their product as DR-DOS.

The terms of the licence do not allow distribution in modified form and have restrictions on commercial use, but do allow the user to modify and compile the source, and the original source distribution remains available, and can be redistributed.

Thus it is possible to distribute a patch kit that allows the user to download the original source, run patch utilities to update the original source and then compile an updated version of OpenDOS, though the terms of the original licence do not allow the resulting binary to be redistributed.

DRDOS was an excellent implementation of DOS however, and commercial development of it appears to have stagnated.

The Enhanced Dr-DOS project maintains and improves a freely licensed patch kit, allowing public development of OpenDOS to continue.

The project remains in active development, and maintains a vigorous forum. Latest version is 07.01.08WIP released in August 2006.

See also FreeDOS, a freely licensed rewrite of DOS, which is all licensed under a free software licence, and is thus freely distributable as source and binary. The projects share some common code (?).