[Fedora-packaging] Binary FreeDOS image

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 07:47:54AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a
> tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS
> utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal
> (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we
> distribute sources as well.
> 
> Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source
> tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while
> cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.

Just a note that I checked on Debian's package (dosemu[1] and
dosemu-freedos) and they are also distributing the freedos binary.

According to their README file:

  The files dosemu-freedos-*-bin.tgz and dosemu-freedos-*-sources.tgz,
  previously packaged in the separate Debian package dosemu-freedos,
  are also licensed under the GPL version 2, see above.
  However, they currently require non-free C compilers to build.

This still doesn't make it OK to distribute the binary without
building from source IMO.  We should get together with Debian and fix
whatever problems are stopping us from building FreeDOS using Free
tools.

Rich.

[1] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/dosemu

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