Why ms-sys was removed on hardy?

ms-sys was removed from debian unstable, and thus from ubuntu, for copyright infringement:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=470678

"Copyright infringement" is a bit too aggressive answer.

After reading http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=694012&group_id=59200&atid=490228 i would say that the package was removed because it had undefined and/or unresolved licencing issues, and removing the package was a precautionary/temporary solution for the problem.

this solution sucks

so microsoft will waste is time suing for a fucking bootloader ?
lol

@mirak

No, but they'll waste their time sending out ridiculous DMCA take down notices.

Someone should fork ms-sys with only the boot sectors from FreeDOS and SYSLINUX. That surely would not be infringement. Call it "fd-sys".

@TheReaperD

No they won't. Removal of this package because of 512 bytes of machine code is silly copyright paranoia.

.deb files are here: http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/ms-sys/download

"All a Windows MBR does is attempt to boot whichever partition on the HDD is marked as bootable, or active, so there are many open-source boot loaders that do exactly the same thing, including the two methods given above."

Is this true?

I found it here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=622828

For information, here is a PPA with ms-sys : https://launchpad.net/~rzr/+archive/ppa

Do you know what /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin is ? and what is the difference between ms-sys and the mbr package (which is still in repositories) ?