Licenses

Inform is free and runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris. It uses many different programs, tools, and libraries to do so; these are all copyrighted by different people, and released under several different software licenses.

The Gnome Inform 7 program is a graphical user interface to the Inform 7 command-line tools. Gnome Inform 7 was originally designed for the Gnome desktop, but it will work as well on KDE or any other desktop that allows you to install and use the GTK libraries. It is copyright © 2006–2014 Philip Chimento, and is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). See the file AUTHORS, or select Help → About and then press the Credits button, for a list of contributors.

Other than portions to which Gnome Inform 7's author and contributors hold the copyright, Gnome Inform 7's source code contains portions which are:

Finally, and perhaps not surprisingly, it contains portions derived from David Kinder's Inform 7 user interface for Windows, which is copyright © 2006–2014 David Kinder, and released under the GPLv2, and Andrew Hunter's Inform 7 user interface for Mac OS X, which is copyright © 2006–2014 Andrew Hunter, and also released under the GPLv2.

Some of the underlying command-line tools are open source software, and some are not. The Inform 7, or Natural Inform, compiler is copyright © 2005–2014 Graham Nelson and distributed under the traditional Inform license: it is free, and imposes no significant restrictions on even commercial use, but is not yet open source in the sense of the GPL (even though source code is likely to be published in due course): in particular, those wishing to develop variant forms must apply for copyright permission.

The open-source tools are Inform 6, cBlorb, and Inweb. They are copyright © 1993–2014 Graham Nelson, and their source code is distributed verbatim along with Gnome Inform 7's source code. Inweb is only used for compiling cBlorb and is therefore not included in binary distributions of Gnome Inform 7. Inweb and cBlorb are released under the Artistic License 2.0, whereas the Inform 6 compiler is published under the original Inform license, or under the Artistic License 2.0, at the user's choice.

Several auxiliary programs are used in Gnome Inform 7, for interpreting story files or other purposes. Their source code is distributed in a modified form along with this program's source code. One of these is Frotz, which is copyright © Stefan Jokisch, and released under the GPLv2.

Another is Glulxe, which is copyright © 1999 Andrew Plotkin. For more information on Glulxe, go to http://www.eblong.com/zarf/glulx/index.html.

The third and final one is Git, which is copyright © 2003 Iain Merrick, and released under an MIT License.

The program used to display these interpreters in the main application is the Chimara Glk library, which is copyright © 2008–2014 Philip Chimento and Marijn van Vliet, and released under a BSD License.

Chimara's source code contains documentation belonging to the Glk specification which are copyright © 1998–2004 Andrew Plotkin. For more information, go to http://www.eblong.com/zarf/glk/index.html.

Also included in the source code of this program is the Osxcart library, which is copyright © 2009–2014 Philip Chimento, and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 (LGPLv3).

This concludes the copyright and licensing information for the software that you received when you downloaded this program.

A note on copyrights: although free software always includes a license, it does not always have a prominently displayed copyright notice. However, most free software licenses require users to reproduce the copyright notice in any software that copies code from the library — presumably, they want to reject users who are not sufficiently motivated to dig up the copyright notice. I have made every effort to reproduce the correct copyright notices of all the code I took from other free software, looking first in the software's documentation, and failing that, on the software's website. From that point on, things start to get a little iffy. Debian Linux is meticulous about including copyright notices in all their packages, so that is a good place to look, but I have found that they are not always up to date. Sometimes, different copyright notices are available from one or more sources. In that case, I have picked the one with the most recent year. If you are the copyright holder of any of the software mentioned here and you feel I have misrepresented your copyright, I will be happy to correct it, on the condition that you display your copyright notice more prominently.