Possible legal problems with Balder 10 (FreeDOS 1.0), although GPL
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
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