Ainsi parlait Kurt Siegl : > On Saturday 27 October 2001 09:40, James Cameron wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 11:27:35AM -0400, Dave Ahn wrote: > > > James, perhaps it's time to revisit this licensing issue and either > > > rerelease netrek under an existing OSS license or create our own. > > > > I agree, and I prefer rereleasing under an existing OSS license, but I > > have no idea how this is done. Is it simply a matter of sticking the > > GPL on it and thus violating the 'without fee' clause of the old > > license? > > Actually to do it right you would need to ask all persons named in the > copyright.h files personally whether they agree. > > As for the 'without fee' clause I would read it more the open way, that one > may use it without fee for whatever you want and not in the closed form > that you must only give it away for free. Caution there : including netrek it in a distribution (as i'm currently doing) that is downloadable but also sold is sort of making money with it. If you want to prevent this, you can't say it's free software. > But the more importaint thing in the license is the clause 'the above > copyright notice appear in all copies' which basically means that the > authors must be honoured by mentioning their names. I think with GPL this > isn't guaranteed anymore. I'm not a license expert, but I guess BSD license > is better with this respect. You're right there. > > I suspect I am not qualified to make this judgement. I'll need some > > opinions. > > As for my contribution on the project, I agree with a license change and we > definitely should use one the existing OSS licenses, to avoid further > confusions. Netrek is Copyright (c) 1986 during that time all this license > schemes didn't exist. > > Anyway, since Netrek is a comunity project now, I guess making a poll on > r.g.n. as well as on the development lists should be enough for a license > change. While talking about software license, i just read in latest month Brave GNU world issue (http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-31.en.html) an invitation to speak of free games: Very often a lacking user base is a problem for new areas, so I'd like to introduce Free games in the Brave GNU World more often. If you are having fun with a Free game or are working on one yourself, please get in touch [1]. Also information about a portal that is exclusively dedicated to Free games would be quite useful. Enough introduction for now, lets get started. Maybe you could present netrek there, both for advertising and also for asking license experts some advices ? -- Guillaume Rousse <rousse at ccr.jussieu.fr> GPG key http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/~rousse/gpgkey.html