angband license

Wart wart at kobold.org
Sun Feb 26 06:12:08 UTC 2006


While I was packaging angband, I came across this questionable license
text.  Before I spend too much time with this, I wanted to verify that
the first paragraph is valid.  In particular, it says that the software
can be copied and distributed for non-for-profit purposes, that is, not
for commercial purposes.  Does this disqualify it as an OSI-compatible
license?

Note that the current maintainers are actively trying to relicense it
under the GPL, but have not yet gotten permission from all of the
earlier authors.  The web page at the end of the license also claims
that it can't be legally distributed with Linux distributions due to GPL
incompatibilities, but I question that claim.

Does anyone has some insight as to the acceptibility of this license?

--Wart

Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke

This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research,
and not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement
are included in all such copies.  Other copyrights may also apply.


All changes made by Ben Harrison, Robert Ruehlmann, and many other Angband
developers are also available under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.
Note that this doesn't influence the current distribution, since parts of
the source are still only available under the old Moria/Angband license.
Until all parts of Angband are distributed under the GPL the only valid
license remains the original Moria/Angband license.

More informations about Angband and the GPL can be found at:
http://www.thangorodrim.net/development/opensource.html




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