On 05/03/2016 03:14 PM, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
Does this mean that, if we strip FreeDOS out of dosemu / dosemu2, we can ship it and even point to a website with FreeDOS binaries?
AIUI the only problem with FreeDOS is that no one knows how to compile it with a free software toolchain. As far as I know, the binary is pretty clearly redistributable. (Hmm. Could FreeDOS ship as a firmware blob? That seems dubious to me.)
Are the FreeDOS sources under a Fedora-acceptable license?
I would not consider FreeDOS to be firmware, thus, the firmware exception would not apply.
~tom
== Red Hat
On Tuesday, 03 May 2016 at 21:23, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 05/03/2016 03:14 PM, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
Does this mean that, if we strip FreeDOS out of dosemu / dosemu2, we can ship it and even point to a website with FreeDOS binaries?
AIUI the only problem with FreeDOS is that no one knows how to compile it with a free software toolchain. As far as I know, the binary is pretty clearly redistributable. (Hmm. Could FreeDOS ship as a firmware blob? That seems dubious to me.)
Are the FreeDOS sources under a Fedora-acceptable license?
A cursory look at their website suggests they're licensed under the GPL. I haven't checked which version, exactly.
They say their reference C compiler is the Open Watcom C, which seems to be distributed under this license: ftp://ftp.openwatcom.org/pub/license.txt . The license seems complicated and probably non-free in Fedora terms.
Regards, Dominik
On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 03:23:45PM -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
Are the FreeDOS sources under a Fedora-acceptable license?
Probably needs review. It's mostly GPLv2, but some of the included software has various other licenses. See http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=util. I'm looking with the Fry meme* at a couple that say "Source code available (open)".
* https://imgflip.com/s/meme/Futurama-Fry.jpg
On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 5:17 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 03:23:45PM -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
Are the FreeDOS sources under a Fedora-acceptable license?
Probably needs review. It's mostly GPLv2, but some of the included software has various other licenses. See http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=util. I'm looking with the Fry meme* at a couple that say "Source code available (open)".
As far as I'm aware, all of the core of FreeDOS is GPLv2, but various extra utilities may be under other licenses. Things that we can't include are probably easy enough to remove.
The real problem is going to be building FreeDOS from source. As far as I know, we don't have a FOSS compiler that can produce 16-bit binaries. There is OpenWatcom, but its license is listed as one of the bad ones. Anyone know anybody at Sybase/SAP would could fix this? SAP appears to be the current copyright holder for the code, as they acquired Sybase in 2012.
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Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski -
Matthew Miller -
Neal Gompa -
Tom Callaway