From: Ross Williams <ross AT guest DOT adelaide DOT edu DOT au>
Subject: Question about GO32 and commercial code.
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 1994 19:37:38 +0930 (CST)


Dear DJGPPers,

I'm trying to build a commercial product for which I will be charging
*money*. I tried to compile it under Borland C, but there wasn't
enough run-time memory, and Borland don't sell a DOS extender (at
least not this week). So I got hold of a copy of DJGPP and
successfully compiled my program under it. It's great! Everything
looks flat inside of DJGPP. I'm very impressed.

Anyway, I copied my executable PROG.EXE onto a disk and took it to a
beta tester and it wouldn't run on his machine. It said it couldn't
execute GO32. Now I knew when I linked my program that GO32 was
involved, but I thought that by using coff2exe after linking, that
GO32 would not be required at run time. Seems that it simply means
that you don't have to actually type GO32 as a prefix to the command
line, while still requiring GO32 to be present and "in the path".

The other thing is that I want to be sure that my shipped executable
is free from FSF code. My understanding is that it will be free from
FSF code because: 1) GO32 is written by DJ, not FSF, 2) docs say that
the only libraries linked in are libc.a and libgcc.a, and they're not
FSF.

So in the end, I have two questions:

   1) Do I have to ship to my customers GO32.EXE as well
      as MYPROG.EXE? Is there any way of avoiding this?

   2) Assuming I don't link in any libraries explicitly, is it
      OK/legal to ship MYPROG.EXE (and if necessary GO32.EXE)
      to paying customers?

I'd VERY much appreciate answers to these questions.

Thanks,

Ross.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Name    : Dr Ross N. Williams                                |
| Company : RockSoft Pty Ltd    (Reg TM Australia, TM USA)     |
| Net     : ross AT guest DOT adelaide DOT edu DOT au.                        |
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