Hello Sam, I am CC'ing this to the Parabola GNU/Linux list, since they have dosemu in their community repo.
On Sat, 18 Dec 2010 21:29:48 +0100 Sam Geeraerts <[email protected]> wrote: > So dosemu is libre and FreeDOS is libre, but FreeDOS can only be built > with non-free tools? Exactly. > That last step is not good, but it's beyond what we > should worry about, IMO. After some thinking I am not sure about that. Dosemu is in Debian contrib (it isn't included in Trisquel or gnewsense), a repo for free software which depends on non-free software to use or build. The source package of Debians dosemu contains a binary and a source tarball of FreeDOS, the accompanied README states: "The dosemu team itself has not compiled everything from those sources, but most are copied and stripped down (deleting files and symlinking duplicates) to tailor a minimal system. This work has been done manually (no script) and the resulting tree is simply tar'ed to build dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz." In more concrete words: To build FreeDOS binaries you have to use non-free software. By delivering the FreeDOS sources (required by the GPL) we would suggest, that the user installs non-free software, which is not desirable. > > OpenWatcom is released under the "Open Watcom Public License". The FSF > > license list don't > > mention it. > > > > Has anyone more insight regarding this matter? > > There's a debian-legal thread about it [1]. > > At first glance I'd say at least section 2.2(c) is a problem: if you > modify the software and install it at your workplace, then you have to > make your modifications available to everyone, not just those you gave > the binaries to. > > [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg34680.html Yes, you're right, additionally there seem to be other matters, e. g. 12.1(c) strikes me as even more obvious non-free, as it says that the license terminates if you "commence an action for patent infringement against Sybase or any Contributor." So, I think that, because of this matter, Dosemu should be listed on http://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines (theoratical) fixes would be a) to port FreeDOS to djgpp b) to replace FreeDOS with another free DOS that can be built with free software (someone mentioned a nasm port of RxDOS, but I haven't found a copy) Regards, Henry
