OSLib History and Copyright
OSLib is copyright © 1994, 1998 Jonathan Coxhead. It 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.
Jonathan wrote OSLib during the time that he was employed by Acorn Computers Ltd during the mid-1990s, as a private project, but generously ceded the copyright for specific versions to them. For that reason OSLib version 5.1 was available from the Acorn Computers FTP site under their copyright. With the demise of Acorn in 1999, their FTP site was closed, and this is now the only supported source for OSLib.
After Jonathan left Acorn in 1995, he continued with the development of OSLib, and in December 1998 released version 5.3 as free source software under the GNU General Public licence version 1, or (at your option) any later version.
Under the conditions of this licence, the term 'free' is used in the context of 'unfettered' rather than 'gratis'. It means that the source code is freely available, and that anyone may use it to build and distribute a version of their own, with the two provisos that they make no charge for it, other than the reasonable cost of the distribution media, and that they redistribute all copyright and ownership notices intact. The new distribution may not be under more onerous terms than the original.
The copyright holder has granted a small relaxation of the conditions of the GNU Public Licence, in that OSLib is itself free software, but applications linked to it need not be. This means that any changes to OSLib itself (the contents of the OSLib, OSLibHelp, OSLibSrc, and OSLibSupport archives) fall under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence; but programs written using OSLib need not be so restricted.
In other words, OSLib may be freely used in the construction of proprietary software. However, do please consider joining the ever increasing free software movement, by releasing your work under an Open Source approved license. Free source is good; hoarded source bad!
Naturally, although anyone may make a distribution, it does not make much sense for lots of different distributions with different capabilities to spring up, and the developer team therefore request that any submissions for inclusion be routed here. This is the sole reference site for OSLib supported by the author and copyright holder, Jonathan Coxhead.