Missing license information

[Apteryks]

I'd like to package this for GNU Guix, but sadly, there is no license file/information attached to this project or the original (and as a policy, we do not add sofware with unclear/unknown licenses).

I've contacted the original ASM6 author about it; and will keep this issue updated with whatever new information I get from them.

[Apteryks]

Haven't heard back from them yet. Does anyone know of another means to reach them? (I tried by email).

[Apteryks]

I note that the distributed asm6.zip original source of asm6 has a README.TXT file mentioning:

This is free software.  You may use, modify, and / or redistribute any part
of this software in any fashion.

So it is free software, but the exact license is unknown.

[Apteryks]

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/asm6f#discussion wrongly claims this software is under the 'unlicense' license.

This one: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/asm6/template wrongly claims it's in the public domain.

[koitsu]

Loopy (original author of asm6 and other utilities) is well-known for being anti-license and never including any licenses with his software. His attitude is: "do whatever you want with this, in any way/shape/form", as you've found. There is no "public license" that matches this wording.

Loopy very rarely ever communicates with anyone. He's well-known for being private and very busy. Odds of you being able to reach him are likely zero. Those of us OGs in the nesdev community are able to reach out to him, though again, very very rarely. Loopy does not care to deal with license-related questions.

The closest licenses you will find to this wording are:

• https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html which is https://unlicense.org/
• https://spdx.org/licenses/WTFPL.html

asm6f does not change the license of original asm6, which is good (thumbs up to freem).

You are in search of a solution for a non-existent problem. Let it be.

P.S. -- I am the maintainer of the Chocolatey package.

[Apteryks]

Thanks for the feedback. In Guix I have been using the non-copyleft procedure that you can point to a file in the repository to denote the license, like so: (non-copyleft "file://readme-original.txt"). That appears to be the correct way going forward if Loopy is uninterested in selecting a standard license for their projects (which ironically would probably mean less licensing questions directed at them :-)).

[koitsu]

We may want to just include a LICENSE.txt file taken from the README.txt (readme-original.txt) itself, with contents nothing more than:

This is free software.  You may use, modify, and / or redistribute any part
of this software in any fashion.

Though this doesn't technically fit into any of the well-known license labels we're all familiar with (ex. GPL, BSD 2-clause, WTFPL, etc.), it would at least retain Loopy's original conditions. What do you think about that?

[Apteryks]

That would still be an improvement, I think!