1 This directory is intended to document the history of Beyond The Titanic and
2 provide documentation of how it became free software.
4 Beyond The Titanic was originally written by Scott Miller in the 1980s. Going
5 off of the copyright notices in the source code he began in 1984. The game
6 was originally proprietary.
8 Later, Scott Miller was one of the founders of Apogee Software, Ltd. in
11 According to the corporate timeline [1] Beyond The Titanic was published in
12 1986 before Apogee started and then released as freeware (but still
13 proprietary) in 1998 [2]. In 2009 Apogee Software released the source code
16 Based on the comments made in the announcement [3] and in the readme.txt that
17 came with the game [4] it appears that they were putting it under the GPL as
18 part of their process to throw the code over the wall to forget about. They
19 even just added the part of it being GPLed underneath the previous text from
20 where the game had been released as freeware in 1998.
22 In reviewing the license headers in their release [5] there are copyright
23 notices from Apogee Software so it appears that Scott Miller transferred his
24 copyright to Apogee at some point. This make sense since he was one of the
25 founders of the company and the game had been distributed as an Apogee
26 program. Also, the license headers indicated it was specifically released
27 under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. I took
28 advantage of that to upgrade it to the GNU General Public License version 3
29 or any later version. The modifications are licensed under the GNU Affero
30 General Public License version 3 or any later version. This combination of
31 GPLv3 or later and AGPLv3 or later is permitted under section 13 of each
34 [0] See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=3D_Realms&oldid=605663632
35 [1] See the file timeline.png or visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.3drealms.com/history.html
36 [2] See the file btt-freeware.png or readme.txt in this directory or visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.3drealms.com/news/1998/03/beyond_the_tita.html
37 [3] See the file gpl-announcement.png or visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.3drealms.com/news/2009/03/several_old_games_released_as_freeware.html
38 [4] See readme.txt in this directory.
39 [5] See the initial commit in this git repository or ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/tit_free.zip