On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 6:12 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/28 Austin English austinenglish@gmail.com:
On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 5:34 PM, King InuYasha ngompa13@gmail.com
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/debian-legal@lists.debian.org/msg34684.html
I emailed licensing@fsf.org 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.