[Scummvm-devel] DiscWorld license

[Max Horn]

Hi Ender, hi all,

I just read this on <http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Discworld>:

"In short, we have all the approval needed to move forward with 
supporting the game and making Discworld freeware. However Discworld is 
NOT freeware at the moment. It may be in the future, assuming all goes 
according to plan.
We may not be able to wing a DFSG/OSI compatible license on this one, 
although I'll surely try."

That last sentence causes me big pains. Essentially, if that is the 
case, getting the DW source is completely useless for us. We wouldn't 
be able to host such a non-OSI DW source as part of ScummVM, probably 
not even on SF.net -- we'd have to setup and external source 
repository. Furthermore, we (and nobody else) couldn't legally 
distribute ScummVM binaries with DW linked in, unless we chose to 
relicense ScummVM (and offer it under an additional, non-GPL-license; a 
very problematic step, which would require us to contact every past 
contributor). A small hope in that regard would be to enable plugin 
based building by default, but that opens a whole can of other 
problems, and isn't supported on all platforms anyway.

So, to sum it up, if we don't get a DFSG/OSI compatible license on this 
one, we have a real problem. To  me personally, it would render the 
whole thing totally useless, as I have no interest in being involved in 
such a project at all.


Regards,

Max