License for glktermw

Hi,

This is mainly a question for @zarf

I am working to package glktermw for Debian, and our ftpmaster team noticed that the glktermw license permits modification of the code but not the documentation, and as such doesn’t meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

This might be resolved by changing “incorporate this code” to “incorporate this code and/or documentation”. Or, more preferably, you could adopt a similar license already in wide use; a list at https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses may be helpful. The MIT license, in particular, looks quite similar to yours.

Would you be open to making this change?

Thanks!

John

Hi. I’m sorry, I know you’ve been trying to get an answer to this for a few weeks now.

The other Glk libraries that I support are under the MIT license (code and included documentation). I intended to switch GlkTerm over to the same license, but I must have never gotten around to it. GlkTerm/GlkTermW haven’t been updated in a really long time.

(Yes, there are recent pull requests which I haven’t gotten around to either…)

I’ve committed changes which switch GlkTerm/GlkTermW over to the MIT license. This isn’t a release; it’s just the license and code comments which refer to the license.

3 Likes

Debian people tend to be a bit hardcore about 100% OS (perhaps a plain example of two wrongs not doing a right…)

I’m sure Zarf will amend the license when updating glkTerm; In the meantime, John, you can suffer having your package confined (quarantined in the eye of an hardcore Debianist…) into Debian-nonfree ?

(I actually use Debian Linux, but this is because I know how to compile, so I can build for myself non-debian-approved OS code)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

Yes, please merge those pull requests. I’d like to build on those to add in audio support from Frotz. The relevant code was dual-licensed GPL2 + MIT so it could go into glkterm without license trouble.

1 Like

Hi,

Thank you very much for the change, Andrew! I will upload a new package to Debian ASAP.

Piergiorgio, I’m not sure what would make glktermw non-free; I packaged it in order to package glulxe.

1 Like

as above, the current licensing don’t cover mods to the documentation. Perhaps I was ambiguous… seemed obvious that the issue is on the documentation, and the non-free part (the documentation…) can be separated (segregated ?) in the non-free/doc keeping the code and built in the main.

hope to have clarified… anyway, best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.