Hi, Sorry for the late reply.
On Wed, 03 May 2023 21:10:21 -0400
Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Normally what we mean by "steering users" towards installing a certain
> (nonfree) program is text that suggests installing it. For instance,
> including that program in a list of programs available to install.
>
> The scummvm case is quite different. It is useful only for running
> certain nonfree games. Does this imply that offering to install
> scummvm is tantamount to steering the user towards those nonfree
> games?
>
> This is a borderline case. I think that "stearing towards" installing
> a game has to involve listing the game itself among things that the
> user could install. Just listing scummvm among things that the user
> could install does not seem to get there.
>
> But I think it would be better not to include scummvm in the packages
> of a distro.
I'm unsure if we reached some conclusion or not in this thread. My
initial question was more about the license of some specific games, and
not about scummVM itself nor about the lack of source code,
specifically because that looked way easier to decide on that
(and also because I didn't see a part of the license).
If for some reasons that license is free, or if we don't want to decide
if it's free or not, we would then need to do some research and look if
the game files are archives that contain some source code (maybe the
scummvm-tools package could help with that).
And we would also need to make sure that the code or game data is
modifiable with free software. So we'd need to review software like QT
Agi Studio[1] (GPL v2?v3?+?) to see if it works or if it has nonfree
dependencies, or if it has trademarks issues or not or understand
trademark implications. And at the end of the day that, after all that
we would still require the license to be free as well anyway, so we'd
have to decide on that.
Then since ScummVM reimplements an initially nonfree game engine, to
understand if scummvm is borderline or not we would need to verify that:
(1) There is no compatible free game or program redistributed by the
scummvm project somehow. This is easy to do if we decided that the
license is nonfree. If the license is free it's very time consuming.
(2) There no game made for the original nonfree game engine that
also works with scummvm and that is free. All redistributable games
for the original engine are probably already hosted by the scummvm
project so this should be relatively fast to confirm.
(3) There is also no game made specifically for scummvm that is free.
So we'd need to look into games like broken sword 2.5 to see if
they are free or not. And here again, depending on if we find a
free license or not, or which tools it needs, the work could be
time consuming or fast.
References:
-----------
[1]https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=AGIWiki/QT_AGI_Studio
Denis.
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