A group of developers, dissatisfied with the change in the license for the SIMH retrocomputer simulator, founded the Open SIMH project, which will continue to develop the simulator's codebase under the MIT license. Solutions related to the development of Open SIMH will be collegially adopted by the governing board, which includes 6 members. It is noteworthy that Bob Supnik, the original author of the project and a former vice president of DEC, is mentioned among the founders of Open SIMH, so Open SIMH can be considered the main edition of SIMH.
SIMH has been in development since 1993 and provides a platform for creating legacy computer simulators that fully replicate the behavior of reproducible systems, including known bugs. Simulators can be used in the learning process to get acquainted with retro technology or to run software for non-existent equipment. A distinctive feature of SIMH is the ease of creating simulators of new systems by providing ready-made standard features. Supported systems include various models of PDP, VAX, HP, IBM, Altair, GRI, Interdata, Honeywell. Of the Soviet computing systems, BESM simulators are provided. In addition to simulators, the project is also developing tools for converting system images and data formats, extracting files from tape archives and obsolete file systems.
Since 2011, the main project development site has been a GitHub repository maintained by Mark Pizzolato, who has been a major contributor to the development of the project. In May, in response to criticism of the AUTOSIZE feature that adds metadata to system images, Mark made changes to the license for the project without the knowledge of other developers. In the new license text, Mark has prohibited the use of all his new code that will be added to the sim_disk.c and scp.c files in case of changing the behavior or default values ββassociated with the AUTOSIZE functionality.
Because of this condition, in fact, the package was transferred to the category of non-free. For example, a modified license will not allow delivery of new versions in the Debian and Fedora repositories. To preserve the free nature of the project, conduct development in the interests of the community and move towards collective decision-making, an initiative group of developers created an Open SIMH fork, into which the state of the repository was transferred before the license change.
Source: opennet.ru