Is XBill nonfree?
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I remember playing XBill in the past, so I decided to install it on my Trisquel box. I found it in the repos, and installed it. while it was installing, I visited XBill's website, http://www.xbill.org, and, scanning the page, I noticed that there was no mention of the license, so I downloaded the source tarball. I looked through the tarball, and could not find any mention of a license at all. I e-mailed Brian Wellington, a co-author of XBill, and asked him what license it is under. I haven't yet gotten a response, (after 10 min. :-) ) but that e-mail address may not be active. (The project is about 10 years old, and isn't very active.)
I found this, http://packages.trisquel.info/changelogs/pool/main/x/xbill/xbill_2.1-8ubuntu1/xbill.copyright but I'm not sure if it's accurate.
Here I can find a version with a matching copyright ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/games/xbill-2.0.tgz
(it's mentioned in README)
Even that version from xbill.org mentions GPL in xbill.6. What a strange place.
It's good you emailed him. (Of course the authors can make it proprietary if they so decide...)
I got a response from him today.
>GPL. It's probably documented somewhere, but likely not as well as it should be. Brian
Good news!
I'm glad you mailed him. I mail people all the time to ask about licensing. I wish more people did it so we wouldn't have to keep guessing. Freedom is of little use if people don't know they have it!
Hmm... The tarball with the license is XBill 2.0. The one I downloaded from xbill.org is version 2.1, with no license at all. The version in Trisquel's repos is 2.1.
It shows the license when I type man xbill into the terminal.
Yeah, that xbill.6 is a manual page in section 6 (games). I found it by grepping recursively the archive for 'license'.
XBill is my favourite game. I play it lots at school.
Concidering that it is anti-microsoft and proprietary software, it would be rather ironic for it to not be GPL
You are defending a lot of proprietary OSes, too, such as Mac OS, Palm OS, and NextSTEP.
I suppose so.. but its free software so I could probabaly change the graphics to show Trisquel, Parabola, FreeBSD, and whatever,
Is Xbill a methaphor for Microsoft's unethical marketing methods?
FreeBSD ain't free.
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