dosemu, elligible for extras or does it have legal issues?

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 02:03:39PM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> I'm thinking about packaging dosemu. Which despite the name is not 
> really an emulator. It is virtual pc software much like vmware, except 
> that it only emulates enough PC to get dos and dpmi apps running and not 
> enough for any protected mode software which does not use DPMI, like say 
> windows.
> One big advantage it has over vmware is that its limited virtual PC 
> emulated can be done without any kernel patches, and even without any 
> root rights.

Note that we already have DOSbox, which emulates a whole i386 with VGA + DOS
(no separate DOS needed). Downside is that it's somewhat slower on an actual
x86 machine, because of the extra emulation layer, but then, it does run on
all platforms, and does an amazing job even with graphical apps.

> 4.   The nature of DOSEMU requires the use of (ie "booting") a DOS,
>      which may be proprietary. This could be interpreted as 'library
>      linking'   the DOS functions to DOSEMU (this view comes from

Using FreeDOS should alleviate this concern. (In fact, it may be useful to
actually bundle FreeDOS into any DOSEmu RPM, so that it's actually useful
out-of-the-box.)

> 5.   Redistributors of DOSEMU sources must not re-package the official
>      DOSEMU packages, including the compression method.
>      Putting the unchanged compressed DOSEMU packages within envelops
>      (e.g. *.rpm, *.deb, double compress) is allowed.

Err, that seems weird and would make this incompatible with any other GPL'd
programs, since it would make forking impossible.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>