Re: Lxdoom, ability to package, copyright
On Sun, Sep 05, 1999 at 03:23:33PM -0700, Joseph Carter wrote:
> The problem with lxdoom (Joey Hess had it in Debian at one point) is that
> the license on the original xdoom source is so non-free it's not
> distributable. Granted, this is not what John Carmack intended, but it's
> what has happened. When this was discovered we had to pull it.
>From id's DOOMLIC.TXT:
3. Prohibited Uses: Under no circumstances shall you, the
end-user, be permitted, allowed or authorized to commercially exploit
the Software. Neither you nor anyone at your direction shall do any
of the following acts with regard to the Software, or any portion
thereof:
Rent;
Sell;
Lease;
Offer on a pay-per-play basis;
Distribute for money or any other consideration; or
In any other manner and through any medium whatsoever
commercially exploit or use for any commercial purpose.
[...]
The sticking point, you can se, is 'Distribute for money or any other
consideration.', which clashes with Debian's need to be distributed
for copying costs.
And then, further down...
4. Copyright. The Software and all copyrights related thereto
[...] are owned by ID and is protected by United States copyright
laws and international treaty provisions.
Id shall retain exclusive ownership and copyright in and to the
Software. [...] You must treat the Software like any other
copyrighted material. You may not otherwise reproduce, copy or
disclose to others, in whole or in any part, the Software. You
may not copy the written materials accompanying the Software.
[...]
This is undoubtedly the worst part. Legally, by downloading the
archive which contained that license, I was violating id's
license.
> NONE of the doom ports can be packaged until such time as the issues are
> resolved WRT the original xdoom source license. If that happens it's
> perfectly acceptable to put doom in contrib or if you can come up with a
> free iwad (new textures, new levels, new sounds, new everything) you could
> actually put it in main.
Assuming that the new license that id gives us qualifies as Free, which
I doubt would happen. I'm going to e-mail Carmack either way, though.
> Still, it all comes back to the license iD has given us, which makes every
> single doom port out there a Copyright violation. =< If you can convince
> the people at iD to notice you long enough to get them to fix it, all
> would be nifty---you can package lxdoom and I'll package lindosdoom. =>
What I'm wondering about is how that will work. id can't change licenses
retro-actively - however, in lxdoom, it's referenced as follows:
// This source is available for distribution and/or modification
// only under the terms of the DOOM Source Code License as
// published by id Software. All rights reserved.
In theory, at least, id could change the Doom source code license
and have it still apply. Couldn't they?
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