Some ended with a letter from a lawyer, some with some BIGĬompany using their code under their copyright holdership and their Where people produced software and did not really care for In that referenced post above, someone also writes about the nuisance You do not have any warranty disclaimer in your COPYINGįile or elsewhere. Protect you as the author in case your software causes t trouble to Main reason for having a long long license text is to Meaning, if people crash their trains with your software, youĬould actually be legally prosecuted for that. It does not really protect you as copyright holder of theĬode. Such) in the code and re-distribute that patchset as they like.įurthermore, the current COPYING file is really non-protective atĪll. As the GPL states that people can share the sourceĬode, programmers can easily deactivate license key checks (and Basically, this is allowed and possibleĮven with the GPL-3+ (although Free Software activists will notĪppreciate that). It seems that Rocrail contains features that require a key or suchįor permanent activation. I just stumbled over this post [link reference adapted for thisīlog post), which probably is the one you have referred to above. Getting in touch again, still being really interested and wanting to help.Īs I consider such a non-license as really dangerous when distributing any sort of software, be it Free or non-free Software, I posted the below text on the Rocrail forum: Hi Rob, I investigated the source code (well, only the license meta stuff shipped with the source code.) and found that the main COPYING files (found at various locations in the source tree, containing a full version of the GPL-3 license) had been replaced by this text: Copyright (c) 2002 Robert Jan Versluis, Nice! So, I asked for access to the project's Git repository, which I had been granted. The Rocrail project's wiki states that anyone can request GitBlit access via the forum and obtain the source code via Git for local build purposes only. My impression until here already was that something strange must have happened in the past, so that software developers choose GPL and later on stepped back from that decision and from then on have been hiding the source code from the web entirely. Proactively, I signed up with the Rocrail forum and asked the author(s) if they see any chance of re-licensing the Rocrail code under GPL (or any other FLOSS license) again ? When I encounter situations like this, I normally offer my expertise and help with such licensing stuff for free. However, I highly attempt to stay away from non-free sofware, so Rocrail has become a no-option for me back in 2015. Whenever I stumble over some nice piece of Free Software that I plan to use (or even only play with), I upload this to Debian as one of the first steps. This made me very sad! I thought I had found a piece of software that might be interesting for testing with my model railway. I searched for the Rocrail source code and figured out that it got hidden from the web some time in 2015 and that the license obviously has been changed to some non-free license (I could not figure out what license, though). Hey, this software was GPLed code and absolutely suitable for uploading to Debian and/or Ubuntu. Some weeks ago, I remembered Rocrail and thought. And even more, I was very happy when I saw that it had been licensed under a Free Software license: GPL-3(+).Ī month ago, or so, I collected my old Märklin (Digital) stuff from my parents' place and started looking into it again after +15 years, together with my little son. I was happy to find Rocrail being one of only a few applications available on the market. A year ago, or so, I took some time to search the internet for Free Software that can be used for controlling model railways via a computer.
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