Hi, Jim, On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 5:55 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 9:03 AM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > lincrawl ... (aka, Linley's Dungeon Crawl) is something I used to play > [..] > > relicensed to GPLv2+." I know that's not exactly the same as saying > > the old game is GPL now, but it's close. You'd have to email them > > directly to fully clarify, most likely. (BTW, worse news is that they > > dropped DOS support around 0.5.5 or whatever a million years ago. So > > don't expect sympathy there.) Their site has old 0.5.1 with a DOS > > version (2009?), so that's probably roughly the last build. > > (Presumably that one has been retroactively relicensed as well, but > > you'd have to ask.) > [..] > > What I understand from this is the new versions are GNU GPL v2, but > the old version that has the DOS executable is not. So, omit.
It's technically possible that they only licensed an incomplete part of the original 4.0.0b26 and/or didn't actively relicense all (older) Stone Soup releases either. But that's somewhat pessimistic. You'd have to email them privately to ask for clarification. I understand that you have other priorities, so I don't blame you. I don't play that game anymore anyways. But let's not misunderstand, thinking everything is impossibly broken forever by default. Some things just need clarification. I'm trying hard here to be pedantic because I think it deserves it. I don't want to omit things for imaginary legal reasons. It's "probably" fine, seriously. But the only way to be sure is to email them. (Heck, who knows, maybe a newer release can cross-build with DJGPP again, dunno.) > > tppatch ... has no sources. Again, not sure who packaged that. There > > are other alternatives with sources (e.g. Veit Kannegieser's R200FIX > > asm TSR or Alexei Frunze's BP7_TPL.ZIP / FIX_CRT.PAS), but just having > > sources doesn't automatically mean free/libre. So you'd have to email > > one of them. > > Not having source code isn't a problem per-se (but I'd really prefer > source code). Not having a license file that says something like "you > can share this" or "you can use it however you like" is a problem. Okay, but all you have to do (in theory) is email one or both of the above dudes to ask for license clarification. Both utils have sources available. Maybe you don't care enough, don't truly need it, fine. But I'm just giving you the obvious (to me) options. > > psrinvad ... I don't know, I agree that the license is unclear, but > > Ralf Quint seemed to indirectly imply that the author gave him > > permission to do whatever he wanted with it. (Maybe I misunderstood, > > but it's a fairly simple game.) > > ... > > I would hate to lose this one, after all my "porting" work, but > > it's not the end of the world. Yeah, the license is unclear, but > > I have no idea how to contact the original author. > > If you're making a case that we should include PSRINVAD, can you cite > the license? Admittedly, a game is not "core" functionality, so it's not crucial. In fact, it was never me originally including it in FreeDOS proper. So I was just tagging along, following suit. So my contributions have mostly been to use better (or even free/libre) build tools rather than old, proprietary, hard-to-find TASM (or MASM). At least that's one less worry. The license is ad hoc, which is bad. Armchair lawyers don't know what they're doing. And license proliferation is confusing and a waste of time. Certainly it would be better to have a "standard" license. But I know of no obvious way of contacting the original author. (1995 was many years ago.) He was just a young college kid, probably didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, he said (in doc) "no charge but a small transfer fee is okay". I have no idea of the implications of selling such software. Also, he's Canadian, and we're not, so that does sometimes make a difference (legally, although I'm no law student or lawyer). Who would sell it? How? Why? Does that mean including on CD-ROM is forbidden? Do magazines still come with software CDs? I don't know all the potential gray areas here. It's not ironclad, so none of it will hold up in court (neither his text nor our interpretation ... does "All Rights Reserved" even mean anything anymore in recent years? Isn't that default since forever?). And my bit about Ralf was just innuendo since nothing he said was a direct quote from the original author, so I probably misunderstood. I'm just trying to be thorough, not stubborn. We just don't know. Fear and uncertainty isn't enough to delete everything. I understand your skepticism, but it's truly out of my hands. Certainly I wish there was a good way to clarify or solve such problems, but I don't have any good ideas (outside of just rewriting it from scratch, which is a waste of time). > I'm thinking now that curl is okay. The wiki note says it uses a mix > of licenses, all of which say you can redistribute. So I think this is > okay. But I'm looking for others to chime in here. But do our builds even work? AFAIK, no, so I wouldn't even include it unless someone can verify it actually does work as intended for them. If not, then someone (probably not me, but who knows) should actually try to rebuild it. > > doslfn ... not sure if it's free/libre, but it's widely used. > > I can't find a license for this in the package. As I said above, not > having a license file that says something like "you can share this" or > "you can use it however you like" is a problem. * http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/doslfn.html "Freeware w/sources" ... far from ideal, but it's all we have. But you can email the (former) maintainer for clarification. He's still active (as of Nov. 4, a week ago), so that's hopeful, right? * http://adoxa.altervista.org/doslfn/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
