I want to highlight a comment (see below) from Marco van de Voort and congratulate the Free Pascal team on their recent 2.2.2 release. Marco originally commented on a post I wrote nearly a year ago regarding potential copyright issues and the source code of the project. It sounds like a lot of time an effort was put in to clear up any issues and further sounds like the project is on a good footing with tools in place to help prevent future issues. The comment from Marco is as follows:
The new release 2.2.2 has the disputed code removed, and the cut was made fairly wide (using a tool to identify candidates), and this has been merged to all currently live branches. This is also why it took so long.
We have retired the old releases from our site. (rather than relicense, which could have been since all the disputed code was available under GPL via FreeCLX. This was deemed to confusing)
Since nearly all public releases were affected by these disputed routines (most disputed routines arrived in one batch in 1998-1999, which was pre 1.0), this is particularly sad for some of the more odd ball platforms (like Atari) that are not supported anymore.