[btown]

> You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, distributing the Software for use with commercial products, using the Software in the creation or use of commercial products or any other activity which purpose is to procure a commercial gain to you or others.

If you're in academia and getting a stipend and you look at it as part of your research, Microsoft could argue that that is a commercial gain to you. If FreeDOS has ever been used to make a commercial product (this is very different from the GPL which explicitly delineates derivative works from works produced by the software!), then its developers risk breaking the terms of the license agreement if they taint their thought processes with Microsoft's code. So yes, I'd probably say you're right.