Public Domain OSes

[Notturno]

The purpose of this thread is to collect information about operating systems which are in the public domain or under a public domain equivalent license like the CC0. After that perhaps a wiki article could follow.

So far I was able to find the following public domain OSes:

-MMURTL:
http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl
https://github.com/bproctor/MMURTL

-smallOS:
https://github.com/mooseman/smallOS

-XOS:
http://openxos.org

-TempleOS:
http://www.templeos.org/

-PDOS:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdos/

[~]

My OS is fully public domain. It's intended as a test and learning OS where a lot can be learned from existing code and books, and will try to join all the code around from 90's snippets, tricks, demos, tutorials, and big current projects, into the same kernel and system. I will try to translate all of that code into x86 Portable Assembly for 16, 32 and 64-bit modes as the starting development point, improving the rudimentary accessibility of modern software technology in the process, for example the latest program versions rewritten in assembly for new and very old systems.

My OS is made from a group of support projects that provide the initialization state and functions necessary to run.

Those collective projects together build ArcheFire OS, which are all of those projects implemented starting at the OS level and up:
http://devel.archefire.org/forum/viewto ... 2274&hl=en
http://f.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=32121


I live in a very very small country, making public domain things as personal projects that don't bring desired attention easily or that normally don't have a great development speed is the most common thing ever in those places, very specially when you currently aren't employed and have 100% of your time free for that.

[Solar]

PDOS was actually what gave me the idea to make my C library PD / CC0. Both because I found it impressive that such a large work was put under PD, and because I looked at the CLib implementation of PDOS and thought, "...nope."

(To be honest, that was almost 20 years ago, and to be equally honest, I have not kept track how much that implementation has improved. )

[sandras]

Hi,

I don't really have an OS to show but when I do I intend it to be in the Public Domain. So far I have put all of my code under UNLICENSE. Having said that, and not to thread-jack, but what do you think of UNLICENSE?

[Notturno]

The Unlicense is not bad however I advise you to use the CC0 license because it can be used in any country even in countries where it is illegal to place software in the public domain. Both the Free Software Foundation and the Fedora Project recommend using the CC0 license when placing software in the public domain.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-li ... #Unlicense
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensin ... =Licensing

[Kazinsal]

The big part of using CC0 is that in countries in which "public domain" isn't a thing you can release stuff under, the license explicitly permits anyone full rights to do derive/republish/etc. your work, similar to CC-BY without the -BY. And wherever that's not possible, there's a final fallback of "this license is a guarantee that the author of this work will not attempt to prohibit someone from working under the terms of this license".