freebsd-games / larn / license

[Chuck Swiger]

Alex Perry wrote:
> Dear Ports team,

Howdy--

> 	I'd like to package Larn v12.{0123} for Debian -
> and I'm having trouble establishing the license trail.

Larn may predate people explicitly putting the code they publicly release under 
a specific license.  Most of the files contain nothing more than a one-line 
statement of copyright to Noah Morgan.

> Looking at the "cvs/larn" subdirectory of the port tarball ...
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/local-distfiles/markm/freebsd-games-5.1.1.tar.bz2
> 
> Before patching for FreeBSD, this appears to be upstream V12.0
> and the source directory is well labelled as (c) Noah Morgan.
> Several files have a BSD-with-advertising license grant,
> presumably to cover the modifications made by the FreeBSD team.
> I can't find anything to document the license grant from Noah.
> On what basis was the software originally added into FreeBSD ?

Larn was imported circa 1994 with this commit message:

"Bring in the 4.4 Lite games directory, modulo man page changes and segregation
of the x11 based games.  I'm not going to tag the originals with bsd_44_lite
and do this in two stages since it's just not worth it for this collection,
and I've got directory renames to deal with that way.  Bleah.
Submitted by:	jkh"

...and the earliest version of the larn.6 manpage contains a 4-clause BSD 
license dated from 1990 (which may be boilerplate), followed by:

".\"	@(#)larn.6	5.5 (Berkeley) 12/30/93"

If you want to dig deeper, consult:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/games/larn/Attic/
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/games/larn/Attic/larn.6?rev=1.1&content-type=text/plain
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/games/larn/Attic/README?rev=1.1&content-type=text/plain

You might try looking for a James D. McNamara, as well.

-- 
-Chuck