Re: Grab bag of questions
On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 03:04:50AM -0600, Benjamin Cutler wrote:
> "acc" has a somewhat unclear license regarding distribution and
> modification. It includes both a EULA that sounds like a commercially
> purchased binary, and another license file that basically says "modify
> it, but don't sell it, and keep the notice". I sent an e-mail to Raven
> Software about it, seeking clarfication, but as of this writing, have
> not received a response. Both relevant files are attached below. (The
Neither of those files grants your the right to make unlimited copies of the
original source, let alone distribute modified versions. The "addendum"
might be considered to allow unmodified distribution, but it contradicts the
previous EULA. As such, it is not suitable for any part of Debian, as we
cannot distribute the software in any form.
> package I'm creating as a heavily modified version, specifically for
> ZDoom.) Also, I'm not sure if the "include" files really belong in
> /usr/include/acc or possibly somewhere else.
If they're the typical .h files, /usr/include/acc would be as good a place
as any.
> "zeth-doc" is basically ripped straight from http://zdoom.doomworld.com/
> but lacks any sort of Copyright information at all. So I'm not sure what
> to put into the "debian/copyright" file. I'm also not sure I did the
The contents of debian/copyright would be "the material in this package has
been illegally copied from http://zdoom.doomworld.com/. I'm expecting the
process server any minute."
Why? Because absent an explicit licence to make copies, *any* copyrightable
work has the protection of copyright, which grants to the author of the work
the exclusive right to make copies. Anyone else making a copy of the work
is in breach of copyright laws.
> Test packages are available on mentors.debian.net. Thanks in advance.
Get acc and zeth-doc removed ASAP. I don't know about the others.
Certainly, anything released under the "EULA" is non-distributable.
> SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT
Nothing in there grants anyone the right to make copies for anyone else.
And since the licence mentions Activision a million times, I presume that
the copyright holder of record is Activision, which means that a notice from
Ravensoft is kind of pointless. If Activision licenced the software to
Ravensoft, or sold the copyrights to them, then that should be noted
somewhere useful.
- Matt
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