Packaging freedos, its GPL but no tools to compile?

[Ralf Corsepius]

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.

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.

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.

Ralf