Mark Pizzolato, principal developer of the SIMH retrocomputer simulator, added a restriction to the license text regarding the ability to use future changes made to the sim_disk.c and scp.c files. The rest of the project files, as before, are distributed under the MIT license.
The license change was a response to criticism of the AUTOSIZE feature added last year, which resulted in metadata being added to disk images of systems running in the emulator, which increased the image size by 512 bytes. Some users expressed dissatisfaction with this behavior and recommended saving metadata not in the image itself, which reflects the contents of the disk, but in a separate file. Since it was not possible to convince the author to change the default behavior, some derivative projects began to change the specified functionality through the application of additional patches.
Mark Pizzolato solved the issue radically by adding a clause to the project license that prohibits the use of all new code that he will add to the sim_disk.c and scp.c files after changing the license text, in case of changing the behavior or default values ββ\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbrelated to the AUTOSIZE functionality . The sim_disk.c and scp.c code added before the license change is still available under the MIT license as before.
This action was criticized by other project participants, as the change was made without taking into account the opinions of other developers and now SIMH as a whole can be perceived as a non-free project, which will interfere with its promotion and integration with other projects. Mark Pizzolato pointed out that the changes to the license only apply to the sim_disk.c and scp.c files developed by him personally. For those who are not happy with adding data to the image when it boots, he recommended mounting disk images in read-only mode or disabling the AUTOSIZE feature by adding the "SET NOAUTOSIZE" parameter to the ~/simh.ini configuration file.
Source: opennet.ru