Re: Pre-ITP - LARN and Noah Morgan
Back in August, I wrote:
> All responses appreciated; they confirmed my suspicions. I'll continue
> to try to locate an irrevocable license or the copyright holders.
I have been unable to contact Don Kneller so far, so I'm currently
expecting to backport recent patches onto Noah's upstream version.
Before I do that, I'd appreciate feedback on whether the text below
is sufficient to explain the copyright and licensing ancestry.
----------------------------- cut here -----------------------------
In good faith we believe this version of Larn adheres to the DFSG. It
is based on version 12 with contributions for minor versions to 12.3.
It does not contain VMS specific contributions and a DOS ANSI driver,
however, because their creators explicitly prohibit commercial use,
which is incompatible with the terms of the DFSG.
There are seven known contributors:
Noah Morgan Original author of LARN
James McNamara UNIX install notes, source and patch distribution
Don Kneller Port for DECRainbow and PC compatible
Fred Fish Termcap support for VMS port
Daniel Kegel Enhanced ansi terminal decoding for DOS
Kevin Routley Integration, enhancement and release
Alexander Perry Port for Linux 2.x kernel and GCC 3.x
This text was last updated September 17, 2005.
On 27 July 1986, the original copyright holder Noah Morgan wrote:
> James McNamara has volunteered to maintain the latest sources,
> and provide latest bug fixes to anyone who asks.
> Both James and I will field requests for sources, for those who ask.
On 31 August 2005, Jim described his recollections:
In the mid-1980's I volunteered to assist Noah Morgan with coordination
of patches and source distribution for Larn. I made no claims to Larn's
copyright, and never considered myself as a "successor or assign" of it.
Noah did, however, give me explicit permission to distribute patches and
Larn source to "those who requested it," with no restrictions on venue --
e.g., to the general public. I do not recall any further discussion from
Noah about curtailing rights, but it was clear to me that he made the
source available to all without cost or restriction and encouraged the
independent development of patches for it.
Accordingly, we believe Noah's intentions met DFSG.
In 1990, Kevin Routley wrote:
> LARN was released for the UNIX environment in 1986 by Noah Morgan.
> It was subsequently ported to the MS-DOS environment by Don Kneller.
> Kevin Routley has been working on enhancements to LARN on and off
> for the past year.
On 15 Aug 2005, Kevin reviewed his own intentions:
> I had every intention of distributing my changes to
> Larn under the same conditions. I made every effort at
> the time to document my intentions, but either that
> was insufficient or you possibly have an incomplete
> distribution, or more likely as you said the "rules"
> have changed.
Accordingly, I infer that Kevin's contributions also meet DFSG.
News rec.games.roguelike.misc on subject "Noah Morgan dead"
On 2000/08/25, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> Is it news only to me, that Noah Morgan (author of Larn)
> died 3 or 4 years ago?
On 28 Aug 2005, Ignatios Souvatzis recollected:
> Pete Peterson <> had to ask another person in 2000
> to find out about his death. [...] Also,
> he mentioned that Noah Morgan worked at EMC
> for a while after working at genrad.
The licensing from Don Kneller has not yet been established.
The fallback option is to apply Kevin's and Alex's more recent
patches onto Noah's earlier release in order to omit Don's work.
Fred Fish and Daniel Kegel included specific license text in
their contributions that limit use to Personal, Noncommercial.
The associated materials have been omitted from the Debian
release so the remainder meets DFSG. Consequently, anyone
wishing to compile for DOS or VMS should not use this source.
Debian/Linux/GCC porting contributions are under modified BSD:
Copyright (c) 2005 Alexander Perry <alex.perry@ieee.org>
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of the copyright holder(s) nor the names of their
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE
FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
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