[Z-] Good news and bad news

[Derakon]

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the system here is that when you have two licenses that both apply, the distributor is allowed to use the rules of whichever license is more permissive. Having code under both the Angband and GPL licenses together is a bit pointless except that once all of the code is under the GPL license, we can stop using the GPL license altogether. The problem is that we have to get the permission of prior contributors before we can change the license used on their bit of the code. Or else rewrite that code under the GPL -- but of course without directly copying it!

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by ekolis

So if the GPL applies to ZAngband, why does it not also apply to Z-Angband's Android code?

For V, there are two licences in which you are given permission to use the game; the GPL and the Angband licence. It's dual-licenced in the sense that you can choose what licence to use, not in the sense that both licences apply at the same time.

Does that make sense?

[ekolis]

Originally Posted by takkaria

For V, there are two licences in which you are given permission to use the game; the GPL and the Angband licence. It's dual-licenced in the sense that you can choose what licence to use, not in the sense that both licences apply at the same time.

Does that make sense?

Oh, right, I forgot about that...

[john]

I dont think you can say that Zangband was released under a dual licence. Its correct that we were very keen to switch to the GPL but there were a number of issues at the time that we could not resolve -- pimarily we needed permission from the original author of Rogue. We would have also needed permission from a number of the original Angband authors from back at the University of Warwick (I was there when it was first released to the world although as a player not a coder) and from all prior maintainers of Vanilla (Ben was supportive iirc).

Individual pieces of code that the DevTeam wrote from scratch could be available under a dual licence but all legacy code can only be under the original Angband license. Based on my recollection, that still comprised a fairly significant portion of the game's core engine even for 2.7.5r1. Even if you did a full-rewrite a lawyer could spit you over the concepts, game play mechanics, names and a whole host of other things. I would be interested to find out how Vamilla now claims to be dual licensed.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by john

I would be interested to find out how Vamilla now claims to be dual licensed.

See here for a history.