Wednesday 7 March 2007

The game Oolite was liberated

Yet another liberated game: Oolite, a clone of Elite.

I am the maintainer of the package; it was introduced as a non-free game in Debian, but a week ago upstream has announced that the game is now relicensed with a dual model licensing with GPL and cc-nc-sa 2.0 (the old license). Also, the change applies retroactively to the 1.65 release while further releases will be licensed GPL only and GPL/cc-nc-sa 3.0 for the code and data, respectively.

I have prepared the packages (oolite 1.65-5 and oolite-data 1.65-2) and Simon Richter agreed to make the honorary upload :-) tomorrow morning.

I hope he doesn't forget to build the packages by passing the '-sa' parameter to dpkg-buildpackage :-) and that these packages will reach Etch just in time for release.


As a bonus to this change, the game will be autobuilt on amd64, too.

(BTW, why isn't there any amd64 buildd in the non-free buildd network? Any technical reason?)

Update: the amd64 build seems that was behind in January when I installed the game on my new laptop. 1.65-4 seems that has been built a month ago, much later than the other arches.

Update: It seems that the package is on a positive trend on popularity: a constant rise in the number of oolite package installations is visible...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! Big thanks to the Oolite developers!

Anonymous said...

I always confuse oolite with something like "OpenOffice lite" :-(
Not a good name for a game in my opinion.

Roger said...

It's great to see oolite in Debian/main.

ELite is the only computer game Ive played really seriously. (back in the day on the Beeb).

I now have some local friends who have never sene the game (some too young, some merely american).

I can see and install and Demo session coming along.

Woot!.