Help Porting Our TomeRaider to Ubuntu

[Ivan Krstic]

Ankur Kotwal wrote:
> So instead of answering the original question, we are frightening the
> user about issues that could be resolved later.

My tone was decidedly non-frightening, and licensing is certainly
not an issue that is better left for later.

> Lets help the original poster with their current problems rather than
> have a long drawn out discussion about which license they should use.

You're suggesting that developers should volunteer time and effort
porting an application that can be left proprietary and non-free?

> Does anyone have experience with porting such applications to Linux?

Yes.

> there any information on the net that could be useful to the original
>  poster?

Only the broadest information can be given without more detail about the
TomeRaider source (programming language, dependencies, etc).

> Lets get the difficult work started (i.e. the porting) and in 
> parallel to this, discussions can be had about the license (off the 
> ubuntu-devel list). Lets encourage more organisations to write
> software for Linux without worrying them too much *initially* with
> licensing type issues.

I don't think you've thought through what you're saying. Agreement on a
free license is generally a sine qua non when help is requested from the
free software community; those who aren't willing to educate themselves
about licensing probably aren't serious about releasing their software
freely.

We have a reasonably quick free license primer, including a description
of why licensing should be done early, on the OLPC code wiki:

  http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/SoftwareLicensing

That's a simple, non-frightening, high-level overview that should help
simplify the discussion. In any case, this doesn't really belong on
ubuntu-devel, so a move to sounder is likely in order.

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D