Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of nethack-el

[Ryan Yeske]

Loic Dachary <address@hidden> writes:

>       Hi,

Hi Loic, 

Thank you for your quick response.

(I have CC'd this to Shawn Betts who is the other developer of nethack-el)

>       Unless I'm mistaken, the "Nethack GPL" is a GPL version 1 and
> is incompatible with the GPL v2. If you want we can discuss
> the reason and history of this specific license choice by the nethack
> developers.

>From nethack/data/license:

NETHACK GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
(Copyright 1989 M. Stephenson)
(Based on the BISON general public license, 
copyright 1988 Richard M. Stallman)

To what extent are they incompatible?  Do you mean that the two
licenses cannot be used within the same code base?  Below I try to
clarify where exactly the two licenses are used in our project.
 
>       From what I see in the tarbal, all files are under the GPL v2
> without exception. Could you please submit your project again
> clarifying the license status ?

You are correct, all of the elisp sources we wrote are released under
the GPL v2.

However, the included patch, enh-331.patch, modifies the Nethack C
sources and maintains the license the Nethack developers have chosen
(I don't think we have much of a choice here).  Our changes to the
Nethack C sources touch several existing files and create two new
files (winlisp.c and winlisp.h).
 
What I assumed was that there isn't a license incompatibility as our
GPLv2 elisp code communicates with the NhGPL Nethack binary through
stdin/stdout channels.  However, this could be a bad assumption, as
our elisp code is practically (but not technically) dependent on the
existence of a Nethack binary with our patch applied.  In other words,
our GPLv2 elisp code is useless without a Nethack binary compiled with
the "lisp" window port.  I'm not clear on the law here.

>       Note that Savannah only hosts projects released under a license
> that is compatible with the GNU GPL.

OK, so where does that leave us with respect to distributing a package
which includes a patch to the Nethack C sources?

I'd prefer not to go through the process of submitting our project a
third time until we know everything is going to be ok wrt licensing.

Thanks for your help,
Ryan Yeske