Oolite Bulletins

Hello all,

I have made a Debian package for Oolite and recently has been uploaded into Debian in the non-free section.

At the moment, only a prebuilt verison for powerpc is available, but it will become available on other arches, too.



Unofficial, (no lesser than official ones) packages can be found on the Debian Games Team FTP space for the i386 architecture and others.

Hello all,

Sorry for the misleading information about the package being available later.

The truth is that the packages in the non-free section must be white listed in order to allow autobuilding. This is due to probable issues with licensing terms that might not allow building a package for other than an intended target arch.

I have contacted Adreas Barth and, hopefully his will be fixed soon and builds will appear for all arches.


Sorry again for the delay; In the mean time, the packages on alioth.DEBIAN.org should be usable on i386.

You can grab a copy from ftp://pkg-games.alioth.debian.org/pub/p ... lls/oolite

The non-free (in the FSF sense) aspect of Oolite’s license is the prohibition on commerical use, specifically:

4.c You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

So far as I can see this shouldn’t be a problem as long as the package isn’t distributed on for-pay CDs, although I see why an approval process is required. (As I understand it, Giles feels that a non-commercial clause is necessary, morally if not legally, given Oolite’s, er, “homage” nature.)

Ahruman wrote:

The non-free (in the FSF sense) aspect of Oolite’s license is the prohibition on commerical use,

Here we are interested in the Debian Free Software Guidelines free

Ahruman wrote:

So far as I can see this shouldn’t be a problem as long as the package isn’t distributed on for-pay CDs, although I see why an approval process is required. (As I understand it, Giles feels that a non-commercial clause is necessary, morally if not legally, given Oolite’s, er, “homage” nature.)

No, it shouldn't be, but generally the non-free (the one distributed in the non-free section of Debian repos) are problematic; This is, AFAICT, only a formality for Oolite.

*Looks up*

Ahh. In that case, the license is indeed in direct conflict with guideline #1.

Ahh. In that case, the license is indeed in direct conflict with guideline #1.

That brings me to the thought that the license could be changed in such a way to allow distribuition in a compilation (with other games), but not by itself.

That is because the guildeline #1 says:

The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

But that depends only on Giles' decision.

The problem there is that it would require a custom license, which requires writing legalese. On the other hand, it would enable transitioning to a license designed for software (Creative Commons licenses are explicitly not recommended for software).

Ahruman wrote:

The problem there is that it would require a custom license, which requires writing legalese.

There are existing licenses which are written for this purpose. The Bistream Vera fonts' license is written in such a way.

Ahruman wrote:

On the other hand, it would enable transitioning to a license designed for software (Creative Commons licenses are explicitly not recommended for software).

Indeed.

Hello again,

I have created a backported (Debian Sarge) package for Oolite 1.62-5, version 1.62-5-0.2bkp1.

The package is available on the ftp space on alioth.debian.org for the i386 architecture.

OTOH, note that I haven't ran the application on a Sarge system because I don't have any system running Sarge, so please telll me if anything goes wrong/weird.

eddyp wrote:

Hello again,

I have created a backported (Debian Sarge) package for Oolite 1.62-5, version 1.62-5-0.2bkp1.

The package is available on the ftp space on alioth.debian.org for the i386 architecture.

The oolite-data debian package is available in Debian Unstable. Don't worry, there is nothing in the oolite-data package that would pull something from Debian Unstable thus is safe to add it to a Debian Sarge system (well, if you don't care about a game running on a secure system then you won't care about an arch all -data pckage )