1 This directory is intended to document the history of Supernova and
2 provide documentation of how it became free software.
4 Supernova was originally written by Scott Miller in the 1980s. Going
5 off of the notices in the source code he began in 1985. The game was
6 originally proprietary.
8 Later, Scott Miller was one of the founders of Apogee Software, Ltd.
11 According to the corporate timeline [1] Supernova was published in
12 1987 before Apogee started and then released as freeware (but still
13 proprietary) in 1998 [2]. In 2009 Apogee Software released the source
14 code under the GPL [3].
16 Based on the comments made in the announcement [3] and in the
17 readme.txt that came with the game [4] it appears that they were
18 putting it under the GPL as part of their process to throw the code
19 over the wall to forget about. They even just added the part of it
20 being GPLed underneath the previous text from where the game had been
21 released as freeware in 1998.
23 In reviewing the license headers in their release [5] there are
24 copyright notices from Apogee Software so it appears that Scott Miller
25 transferred his copyright to Apogee at some point. This make sense
26 since he was one of the founders of the company and the game had been
27 distributed as an Apogee program. Also, the license headers indicated
28 it was specifically released under the GNU General Public License
29 version 2 or any later version. I took advantage of that to upgrade it
30 to the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version. The
31 modifications are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License
32 version 3 or any later version. This combination of GPLv3 or later and
33 AGPLv3 or later is permitted under section 13 of each license.
35 [0] See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=3D_Realms&oldid=605663632
36 [1] See the file timeline.png or visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.3drealms.com/history.html
37 [2] See the file supernova-freeware.pgn or visit https://web.archive.org/web/20141014112730/http://www.3drealms.com/news/1998/03/supernova_relea.html
38 [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
39 [4] See readme.txt in this directory.
40 [5] See the initial commit in this git repository or ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/snova_fw.zip