Do folks pay attention to or care about the licenses of the code they use?
I noticed the libtcod stuff used the BSD 3-clause license. The BSD license was a perfectly fine license -- before software patents.
Some free software projects have suffered because someone has contributed a patch where the contributor (or the contributor's company) owns a patent, then the patent owner goes in asking for money for the use of the patent. In the case of software libraries this means a person can sneak in a patent to a library, then once folks use the new version of the library, they can go in asking the folks making money on the library to pay for the privilege of using of the patent.
This is one of the reasons the modern software licenses have specific patent clauses. The Apache v2 license gives the same sorts of rights as the BSD licenses but does so while protecting the software developers (and the users of libraries) from patent issues. For folks that prefer GPL-styled licenses, the GPLv3 family all include patent clauses.
I know few folks would logically go looking for patent issues (or money) with something as old-school as roguelike games, but nothing is fair when it comes to software patents. It's all about crushing innovation and threatening small developers -- and roguelike developers are almost exclusively small developers...
Cheers,
Steven
