Packaging freedos, its GPL but no tools to compile?

[Hans de Goede]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 14:39 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As discussed sometime ago I'm planning on packaging dosemu. I would 
>> really like to also package freedos and make dosemu depend on it so that 
>> dosemu actually has something to boot.
>>
>> The problem is that although freedos is GPL and thus comes with full 
>> source its impossible to compile it, as it needs to compile:
> Why should this be a problem? IMO, DOS executables are not any different
> from any other binaries to be shipped with Fedora, such a BIOS images,
> cross-toolchain target-libraries or picture images. To Linux, they all
> are binary data, to be interpreted by an interpreter running under
> Linux.
> 

Well thats cutting the corner a bit, so the same would go for windows 
apps which run under wine, but then why not compile native with winelib?

I for one would like to see firmware actually get build instead of 
shipped as blob's. (If the firmware comes with source and we can get our 
hands on the tools to compile).

What you're saying now is, as long as it is not a native linux binary, 
license / freedom doesn't matter anymore as long as its distributable.

I do ofcourse fully agree that in this case this is the best solution,
but that is my pragmatic side, not my idealist side.

> I.e. as long as you are legitmated to redistribute these binary data
> files, I don't see why they should be a problem and why there should be
> a need to rebuild them under Linux.
> 

Redistribution is no problem.

> The only special problem I see is them being GPL'ed. You'd therefore
> have to bundle the sources, even if you can't rebuild them under Linux.
> 

That I was already planning

Regards,

Hans