Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of NetHack Proxy - savannah.nongnu.org

[J. Ali Harlow]

Apologies for the delay. It took me rather longer to fix the current  
crop of bugs so that make distcheck would produce something sensible  
than I had hoped.

> address@hidden (Jonathan Gonzalez V.) writes:
>
> Hi J. Ali Harlow:
>
> I reviewed your source code and I found some legal issues.
>
> You should use (C) instead (c), this should be fixed.

I had forgotten that some countries require this. Done.

> As you said you will licensed your program under the GNU LGPL, any
> file with more than 10 lines should carry on the Copyright and  
> Notices License, consider to read this URL to learn how to use the  
> GNU LGPL::
>
>          http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

I think this confusion was caused by the complete mess I made of the  
previous tarball which I sent to you. It being my first autotools  
project, I hadn't understood the need for EXTRA_DIST and so there were  
a number of important files which were left out of the tarball  
including the license files. (I'm afraid there were also some source  
files missed because they weren't yet being used for which I can only  
apologise.)

I hope that you will find the current setup of referring to the license  
in a very brief note at the top of each source file and a full  
description of the options available to users in license.txt  
acceptable. I believe it meets the legal requirements in the UK and the  
requirements of the LGPL. It may be that there are requirements of  
other countries for which I am not aware, in which case I would be  
grateful for a correction. Alternatively, Savannah may have  
requirements which go beyond the legal requirements - again, I would be  
grateful if you could let me know of any that may apply.

I realise that the LGPL recommends including a rather longer  
description of the license position at the head of every file but I am  
somewhat reluctant to do this because I fear that it would either give  
undue prominence to the LGPL at the expense of the NGPL or would need  
careful re-writing which may introduce more problems than it would  
solve. I guess that one option would be to simply include the contents  
of licence.txt in the preamble of each file (dropping the last  
paragraph about Aladdin MD5). At least this way there is less  
opportunity for confusion.

I await your advice.

> What is the license of the files copyrighted by "Slash'EM Development
> Team" ?

That's a good question! When I originally began writing the files in  
question I was expecting that it would be a team effort and I wanted to  
avoid having long lists of copyright statements in the preamble so I  
listed the copyright as you see it. My intention was that the Slash'EM  
development team would thus be granted equal rights as myself and the  
other authors to copy, sell etc. the code with no need to get back to  
the original authors to get any further permission. As it turns out, I  
was the only person who contributed anything to any of the files in  
question so the whole thing was a bit of a waste of time. I'm not quite  
sure how that leaves the legal status, but I see no real reason why I  
couldn't just change the copyright notices to myself if that would be  
any better.

> I'll wait your updated tarball.

I include a copy of nhproxy 0.8.2 and my current TODO list. I can make  
further changes once we've agreed on the best approach.

Many thanks,

Ali.

TODO
Description: Text document

nhproxy-0.8.2.tar.gz
Description: application/compressed-tar