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HunterZ / umoria

Official source code history for the roguelike UMoria.
http://free-moria.sourceforge.net/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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License Status #7

Open killerkalamari opened 3 years ago

killerkalamari commented 3 years ago

I'm confused about the current license status of Moria. Reading http://free-moria.sourceforge.net/ it seems that respondents variously agreed to Public Domain or GPLv2, and the LICENSE file here indeed has:

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991

But the source file headers say this, which seems contradictory (emphasis added):

Umoria is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Additionally, on Wikipedia it says this, which is concerning:

Jimmey Wayne Todd Jr., a major contributor to VMS Moria, along with Gary D. McAdoo, are not listed as consenting to the relicense.

Is the GPL licensing of Moria still in a gray area? Is it GPLv2 or GPLv3?

EDIT: See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/moriarl/comments/7rxwud/umoria_relicense_missing_contributors/ https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria/commit/24ef243f080522f6d832f862e2a05a879ea09994

HunterZ commented 3 years ago

As I mentioned on Reddit, you'd have to get in touch with Ben Asselstine (who has the declarations from the contributors) or David Grabiner (who was the official maintainer through version 5.6).

I've just attempted to archive the versions I could find, for historical reference.

From what I can tell (and as mentioned in the project readme), it seems that most of the original authors declared their contributions either public domain or GPLv2. Whether the latter is "GPLv2 or later" or just "GPLv2" is not something I can answer. David Grabiner then appears to have declared the whole thing to be GPLv3 as of version 5.6, but I imagine that public domain declarations supersede that?

I should probably remove the LICENSE file from the root directory, as it was added by Github. I think the GPLv3 document in files/COPYING is from David Grabiner and was meant by him at least to be authoritative.