advice regarding doom-engine licences
Hello all,
I am emailing the list to ask your advice regarding a collection of licences
which the doom engine and related engines have been licenced under. This is in
relation to bug #264816 , `doomlegacy-sdl: combines incompatible, non-dfsg
licences'.
The doom computer game consists of two main files - the executable and a data
file known as the IWAD. ID Software release the source of the engine under the
non-profit licence described in DOOMLIC.TXT[1]. They later released it under
the GPL licence[2]. The IWAD is only available commercially and for that
reason all doom ports currently go in contrib[3].
Raven Software / Activision later released the heretic and hexen source code
under a new licence[1].
I am mailing to ask your opinions of the following points:
1) The original ID licence and the heretic/hexen licence are both incompatible
with the GPL and thus attempts to mix them result in a combination which
cannot be included in debian nor non-free. Both licences are additionally
not DFSG free.
2) The original ID licence and the heretic/hexen licence are compatible with
each other.
3) the heretic/hexen licence is suitable for inclusion in non-free.
The doom licence has been discussed on -legal before[4] and the concencus
seems to have been that the original doom licence is not suitable for
inclusion in non-free. This leads me to believe that point 3 above is
incorrect.
Thank you for your help.
[1] Please find the mentioned files attached to the bug report #264816
http://bugs.debian.org/264816
[2] possibly as a result of a very popular derivation of the
source going missing due to a single hard disk crash.
[3] Note: there is a project (which I am involved in) to create a free IWAD
and so it is not long before we can put doom engines in main:
http://freedoom.sf.net/ which has been ITPd: http://bugs.debian.org/206139
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/1999/09/msg00008.html
--
Jonathan Dowland
http://jon.dowland.name/
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