While mpxplay is a great way to play media files in DOS on modern (AC97, HDA etc.) hardware, the current license is unfortunately not accepted for the current FreeDOS distro, so FreeDOS 1.2 and 1.3 users alas do not get mpxplay bundled when they download the ISO. This is because of the last sentence in your souce code disclaimer:
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Please contact with the author (with me) if you want to use
or modify this source.
My request to add mpxplay to the FreeDOS distro again got rejected with the following comment:
Ouch. "Contact me if you want to use or modify" the source code is not
very "open source."If you were a hobby developer, you would need to contact the author
and request permission to experiment with the source code. The author
would probably grant permission for a hobby developer - assuming the
author is responding to email (for example, hasn't changed email
addresses, etc). Would the author grant permission if a company (even
a small company) wanted to modify mpxplay to add some neat feature,
with the intention to re-release their patches & updated source code
for others to use?As written, it's unclear if this allowed others to share or
redistribute the source code. "Ask permission to use" suggests that
redistributing the source code requires permission.It would be better for mpxplay to use an accepted, recognized "open
source" license like the MIT license or Apache license.
So given that mpxplay already contains Ogg/Vorbis, ALAC, AAC FAAD2 and other codecs with GPL, GPL 2 or newer, LGPL, BSD and MIT license, it would be great if mpxplay itself could also use a BSD, MIT, Creative Commons or similar license:
https://opensource.org/licenses
Thanks for considering a license update!