On 11/27/06, Guillaume Rousse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Glen Ogilvie wrote: >> Hi, >> > >Way back for Mandrake 10.1, a package called digger was available. Anyone > >know why it's been removed from PLF? >Due to legal changes in France, we recently removed all packages for >which we had no clue about why it was present in PLF. Seems this >packages was part of the purge victims.
It would seem like "Digger Remastered" is legal and GPL'ed, however the original "Digger" is classified as abandonware. So imho there shouldn't be any problems packaging "Digger Remastered". http://www.digger.org/faq.html states Q: Is this legal? A: Yes! Recently the original author of Digger, Rob Sleath, contacted me. He no longer owns the copyright to Digger (or the other games) but he did retain the right to use the code for development of other products. He considers Digger Remastered to be another product, and has granted me copyright to Digger Remastered, which I have chosen to license under the GNU GPL. My distributing of the original games is, strictly speaking, not legal. According to intellectual property law, a work copyrighted by a company continues to be copyrighted for 75 years. I have no moral objections to violating Windmill software's copyright by distributing these games, and I feel you should have no moral objections to playing them (unless you're doing so when you should be doing something else). Copyright exists to protect intellectual rights, not to prevent people from having access to software. I can think of two reasons why Windmill software would want to protect their intellectual rights: To ensure that they are recognized as the true authors of Digger. To ensure that they make as much money as possible. I have retained the original copyright messages in the game and I take pains to ensure that Windmill are credited properly whereever possible so the first of these concerns is taken care of. As for the second - Windmill hasn't made any money from these games for a long time. In conclusion, therefore, I think that I am following the spirit of the law, if not the letter. And since laws, being so rigid, can never be perfect, the world works much better this way (as any fan of these games must concur.)
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