Re: An xconq story and question

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Benjamin Brewster wrote:

> Hi All!
>
> Hi all!  I just subscribed - I've got a story and a question for you 
> all...
>
> When I was a kid, my dad had some UNIX computers at home.  He worksat 
> HP, and always had tons of equipment.  On them was this game called 
> xconq that I absolutely loved.  Eventually, the computers were 
> replaced, and xconq went with them - I forgot about it until last 
> year.  Fast forward fifteen years...
>
> I'm now a student at Oregon State University, and I've been working 
> with DirectX for awhile now.  So, not knowing that it still existed, I 
> decided to start work on a copy of the old xconq as I remembered it, 
> with some new rule sets that I had always wanted to see.  I've got the 
> graphics engine pretty far along (in DX9), and am working on the 
> models and rules.  (I'll try to post a URL of some screenshots soon.)
Cool...

> Eventually, I thought I'd search for the old xconq, and blammo, here 
> you guys are!  As I glanced around, I found that the rule set had 
> grown enormously, and that it was now quite a complicated game. :)
Sorry; seemed like a good idea at the time. :-)

> My question is this: I've named my game Conqueror, and I've included 
> many game elements from that old xconq.  Am I going to get in trouble 
> by releasing this thing? :)

Depends on what kind of trouble you're looking for, heh-heh. If
you've been working with the 5.x or earlier code, it's not actually
GPLed; the two lines of "license" at the top of those old files is
BSD-like if anything, but two lines is not enough to be precise
about these sorts of things, one of the reasons I switched later
code to GPL.

In any case, the intent was to be pretty unrestricted about usage
and distribution. The old license could be construed to disallow
closed-source moneymaking versions of the sort that the BSD license
allows, but if you can make a buck from the old code at this late
date, I'll be amazed and admiring rather than unhappy.

You might not find it too hard to move your interface over to the
latest Xconq; the old stuff had a lot of X10/11 dependency woven
into it, and that's all been moved into separate subsystems. Plus,
there's plenty of people on this list who can help you if you
have any questions.

Stan