Dear -legal, I a currently considering to package Balder 10 for Debian. Balder is a single-disk DOS utility distribution, based on FreeDOS [1] and created by the authors of Finnix. I find it quite useful to be able to boot a full DOS from grub, e.g. for firmware upgrades to my mainboard.
The problem is that Balder is only released as a binary disk image without sources, even without explicit copyright or license notices. All the binary files on the disk image are taken from the FreeDOS project, which is entirely released under the GPL. The source code for the programs is available in the FreeDOS project, but IIRC it is currently impossible to compile with GCC. Also there is no recipe on how to build the disk image from precompiled binaries either. I hope the thread at the Finnix list brings some light to this issue [2]. There is already a copy (at least a subset) of FreeDOS available in Debian in the dosemu package. AFAIUI it ships both the sources and the precompiled binaries for FreeDOS in the source package, so the requirements of the GPL to make sources available are fullfilled, although the shipped binaries are not recompiled from these sources at build time. The debian/copyright file isn't explicit about this, but this is how I understood the situation. The package is in the contrib section, though, but I don't know why. If I could find a way to recreate the disk image from the precompiled FreeDOS binaries and would ship them and their corresponding sources in the Debian source package (although they are not used to recompile the binaries at build time), would you think this package met the requirements for inclusion in the Debian main section? Thanks, Fabian PS: Preliminary packages can be found here (with a stub debian/copyright): <http://debian.greffrath.com/unstable/balder_10-0fab1.dsc> [1] http://www.finnix.org/Balder [2] http://lists.colobox.com/pipermail/finnix/2010-January/000094.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
