PiDP-8/I Software

There has been controversy among the maintainers of simh as distributed at github. The maintainer who heretofore has done a lot of the heavy lifting has seen fit to add new license terms that a large portion of the simh community including Bob Supnik find unacceptable.

The result is that a new fork of simh, called open-simh with an explicit governing body has been created. The intent is to prevent a lone developer from changing the license and creating restrictions on the commonly used code base.

This Feature Request is to convert from use of https://github.com/simh/simh to https://github.com/open-simh/simh. At this time the two codelines are the same as far as our use is concerned.

Open SimH Announcement: https://groups.io/g/simh/topic/announcing_the_open_simh/91528716

Bob Supnik's summary take: https://groups.io/g/simh/topic/simh_licensing_and_the_state/91173868

Other threads of discussion with much back-and-forth can also be found in that forum: https://groups.io/g/simh/topics

Re-synchronizing our distributed simulator with SIMH primarily occurs shortly prior to release. Since there is no current plan for another release of the PiDP-8/I software, and the last re-sync predated this controversy, there is no reason we need to change from what we distribute right now.

Should we ever be motivated to push another release, we can look to upgrading SIMH then. Until that time, all we'd be doing is exchanging the old liberal license for a new liberal license.

I'm leaving this ticket open because I do not believe the PiDP-8/I software project to be "done" except in an operational sense. If it is not stagnant, another release will eventually occur, which according to our release doctrine means this issue will have to be reclassified or closed.

One reason to move might be to switch from direct sampling of the simulator's internal CPU state to the realcons device. We aren't a Blinkenbone, for which the feature was created, but we aren't all that far off, either.

With checkin 1d15be1c09 we have brought the current upstream OpenSIMH to trunk.