Commercial use of FreeDOS

My small company (about 25 employees) manufactures and sells data 
acquisition equipment which is controlled by embedded software (i.e. the 
user never sees the software directly, there's no keyboard or screen). 
The processor is PC-compatible board built around an 80386 equivalent chip.

The original version of the product used an 8088 equivalent CPU which 
came with a DR-DOS 5.0 licence.  When we moved to the 80386 equivalent 
CPU, we had to purchase MS-DOS 6.11 licences from Microsoft at about $40 
for every unit that we sell.  Our unit boots up into MS-DOS, runs an 
AUTOEXEC.BAT which launches our embedded code, and our code uses the 
MS-DOS file system (FAT-16) to write data on IDE-compatible CompactFlash 
disks and M-Systems Disk-On-Chip devices.  That's the only use we make 
of MS-DOS. So our payment of $40 per unit to the convicted monopolist 
rankles just a bit.

FreeDOS looks attractive to us, but I have a couple of questions which I 
hope someone on this listserv can help me with.

- Would the GPL allow us to install FreeDOS on our units, without 
modification, and use it to run our proprietary embedded software?

- As far as a I can see, all the FreeDOS distributions are described as 
"Betas".  To my mind this implies the possible presence of bugs. What 
would be the most reliable FreeDOS version for us, considering that we 
are primarily using the kernel, not the utilities? And also keeping in 
mind that we don't need any advanced capabilities such as extended 
memory support. (We would like to use disks > 512 MB though.)

- If we contribute money to the FreeDOS project, where does it go?

Thanks for your help.


-- 
Jack Dodds
R & D Manager
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Unit #3
3781 Victoria Park Avenue
Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
M1W 3K5
Voice 416-491-7340
Fax   416-491-7378
email "Jack Dodds" <[email protected]>