On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 6:12 PM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2009/3/28 Austin English <[email protected]>: > > On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 5:34 PM, King InuYasha <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> What is wrong with OpenWatcom? It is an open source development > toolchain, > >> with experimental linux binaries, yes, but they do work the last time I > >> checked (which was when 1.8 release came out). > > > It's not widely available, it's license is not open enough for many > > distros (ArchLinux has it available, and there's an initial Gentoo > > ebuild according to their wiki), but Fedora/Suse/Ubuntu don't have it > > available. > > > It fails DFSG (so I'm surprised it passed OSI, given OSI is based on > DFSG), with many important concerns raised: > > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg34684.html > > I emailed [email protected] to ask about it (since it isn't on their > list of licenses) and got back a quick reply saying an official > determination wasn't likely any time in the foreseeable future, but > it's definitely not GPL compatible and they couldn't actually tell at > a glance if it was FSF "free" or not. > > > - d. > > > Unfortunately, at the moment it really is the best we have. AFAIK, there isn't any other FOSS compiler that can build 16-bit DOS/Win16 applications. Unless someone was actually willing to figure out how to make GCC be able to target Win16 (not likely) or write a whole new compiler toolchain to target Win16/DOS, there really isn't anything else left to use.
