Issues surrounding the GPL and Angband

For maintainers, contributors, and interested parties

All the previous maintainers of the main game, and all applicable people from the Moria team, have given their changes under both the Angband and GPL licences. So have the large majority of contributors to the main game.

Legally speaking, the main game is copyright to at least 100 people, which variants should probably be careful to keep note of, along with any contributors to their game.

The way the dual-licence situation is set out is that the code is distributed under either licence at any given time, with the option to always switch between licences.

If you want the main game or other variants to take back things in your variant, you would do well to dual-licence your own code, and to note that the licence for patches is the same as that of the game. If you choose to make your variant GPL-only, or Angband-only, then you remove the possibility of code-sharing with most other variants.

Be careful when taking code from older variants; very few are under the dual-licence, and taking code from them will make your game as a whole GPL-only.