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

[Hans de Goede]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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.
> 

I know, but thats a true PC emulator (like qemu), this uses v86 mode 
making it much much faster, and since it is specifically targeted at dos 
it comes with some dos kernel emulating / patching functions too, which 
allows using Linux directories as drive letters, which is much easier 
then working with images. And as always, choice is good!

>> 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.)
> 

I'm planning on packaging freedos too, or even packaging it with 
freedos, but that will be a seperate thread. I'm taking one step at a 
time :)

>> 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.
> 

They are talking about redistributing the sources, redistributing 
modifed binaries is fine as is SRPM since that contains original tarbal 
+ patches. I think a fork would not be "Redistributors of DOSEMU 
sources" but distributing of a derative work which is fine too.

What they are trying todo is to make sure any source tarbals out there 
are unmodified, or have a different name (IANAL).

Regards,

Hans