A group of developers dissatisfied with the change in the license for the SIMH retro -compound simulator, founded the project Open Simh , which will continue to develop the code base of the simulator under the MIT license. The Open SIMH decision in Open SIMH will collegly take the managing council, which included 6 participants. It is noteworthy that among the founders of Open Simh mentioned Robert Supnik – the original author of the project and the former vice president of the company Dec, so Open SIMH can be considered the main version of SIMH.
SIMH has been developing since 1993 and provides a platform for creating outdated computers that completely repeat the behavior of reproducible systems, including known errors. Simulators can be used in the process of learning with retro-technology or to launch software for already non-existent equipment. A distinctive feature of SIMH is the simplicity of creating simulators of new systems by providing ready -made typical features. Among the supported systems are various models PDP, VAX, HP, IBM, Altair, GRI, InterData, Honeywell. From Soviet computing systems, simulators are provided BESM . In addition to simulators, the project also develops tools .
since 2011, the main place of development of the project was repository on Github, supported by Mark Pizzolato, which introduced The main contribution to the development of the project. In May, in response to criticism of the added Autosize function, adding metadata to the images of systems, Mark made changes to the project license without the knowledge of other developers. In the new text of the license, Mark forbade the use of all his new code, which will be added to him to SIM_DISK.C and SCP.C, in case of change in behavior or default values associated with the functionality of Autosize.
Thus, due to this condition, the project was translated into the category of not free. For example, a changed license will also not supply new versions in the debian and Fedora repositories. To maintain the free nature of the project, to develop a community in the interests of the community and the transition to collective decision -making, the Open Simh initiative group created an Open Simh, in which the repository state was postponed before changing the license.