On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 12:01:12AM -0500, Jon Eisenstein wrote: > A few months back, I attempted to package TinyMUSH 3.0, but ran into some > trouble with a few clauses that seemed to imply something wasn't quite DFSG > free. I had submitted a report to the developers, and they expressed > interest in making it compliant. I haven't really done much with the package > since. For me, at least, it wasn't quite such an easy thing to package. > > PennMUSH may be different, of course. > > > > > 1. Is the license for PennMUSH okay? > > > > If it's standard artistic, then yes. > > > > Speaking as one of the developers of the TinyMUSH 2.2.4 Unofficial line (and spouse to one of the TinyMUSH 2.2 Core folks) - be careful. Be very careful. I don't currently have a backtrace of Penn's code genetics, but TinyMUSH makes extensive use of old code, up to and including the last 3.0 release I bothered to dig into. Said code, if it was licensed at all, was generally licensed with a "no commercial use" or "no commercial use without permission from the authors" clause. And since I know for a fact that some of the folks who wrote it are either not clearly identified or no longer easy to get ahold if (since I tried), I suggest treating any re-licensed work with skepticism. Just because David and Lydia want to relicense 3.0 doesn't mean they have sufficient permissions to accomplish it (legally). This may apply far less to Penn; as I understand it, the Penn codebase diverged at a much earlier point, and has a more consistant code history, with fewer people involved in it. (For the record; I *know* there's code in 3.0 that I wrote, which was submitted under a casual 'whatever license the thing is already under' view; I have not yet been asked about relicensing it; ergo, D&L have not completed due diligence to try to relicense anything, yet). -- Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
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