Rogue - Licensing status

[mouser]

Hello,

I have just discovered Rogue and I was wondering about its licensing status. The word I have got on the streets is that original Rogue was non-free software (because it excluded distributing the game for profit.) Hence, many Linux/Unix distributions refuse to package it.

However:

rlgallery.org has many versions of Rogue derived from the Rogue Restoration Project. It looks like they are licensed under a 3-clause BSD license. As far as I understand, the Rogue Restoration Project based their distribution on the original code of the Unix port of Rogue. This does not make sense to me, unless the original Rogue source code was relicensed at some point and the Rogue Restoration Project took it then. If the latter is the case, could Rogue be distributed from a strict FOSS Linux/BSD repository?

Rogue Clone III seems to be licensed under a 3-clause BSD license too. However, Debian distributes it from the non-free repository, and OpenBSD just refuses to include it. Is there an actual problem preventing the distribution of Rogue Clone III from a free software repository as of today?

TL;DR: Is there any actual licensing problem preventing the inclusion of the original Rogue or a close Rogue recreation from being included in the distribution of an strict free-software repository?

[mouser]

It looks like some files in Rogueclone III have copyright clausules that forbid for-profit use.

[iflowercurrently]

The original Rogue game had non-commercial distribution restrictions, making it non-free by modern open-source standards. While some recreations like those from the Rogue Restoration Project and Rogue Clone III are licensed under the permissive 3-clause BSD license, historical concerns and varying interpretations have led some Linux distributions to categorize them as non-free or refrain from including them in strict free-software repositories. Therefore, there may be hesitation despite the permissive license.

[leomartius]

I did some research just recently, and this is my current understanding.

The program called "rogue" included in some BSD and Linux distributions, is actually Rogue Clone III by Tim Stoehr. This is a clone that was written from scratch. The code includes a non-commercial clause, making it non-free for Debian.

The original Rogue by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold was distributed with early BSD in binary form only (to make cheating harder, I reckon).

A salvaged copy of the source code for a development version of Rogue V5 was found in 1999 and published by Ken Arnold on SourceForge in 2000. The SourceForge project page (by Arnold himself) states the license as "BSD License" with no further specification. The source code includes no license at all.

Finally, the versions released by the Roguelike Restoration Project are released under the 3-clause BSD license, with proper authorship attribution. However, I could find no information on what vetting process, if any, was in place there. The RRP V5 is based on Arnold's SourceForge code, but other RRP versions are based on leaked and often modified code bases found on the internet.