Wormus of prey and Debian

[Thomas Pohl]

Hi,
I browsed through the mails concerning the packaging
of WoP and have a few comments:

1) Graphics are 100% homegrown, made by Gismo, one
    of the three main developers of WoP.

2) Most sounds have been taken from the original Worms
    by Team17. Of course we asked them before and they
    allowed us to use them (see the README file in the
    source package and http://wormsofprey.org/thanks.html).
    The rest of the sounds are free downloads from the
    internet. Here is part of my original eMail to Team17
    and Marty's answer:

    -- Tom ----------------------------------------------------
    Dear Mr. Brown,
    we are a bunch of people programming a
    free computer game called "Worms of Prey"
    ( http://wormsofprey.org/ ) which is a
    realtime Worms clone similar to Liero,
    NiL or Wurmz. Right now we use many
    sound effects we found on the web. Some
    of these seem to originate from your
    original Worms game.

    Do you mind if we keep your sound
    effects in the game when we release it,
    which is scheduled for this month? Of
    course we would acknowledge the
    cooperation of Team17.
    [...]

    -- Marty --------------------------------------------------
    This is ok regarding the sounds, but we must object to the term
    "Worms" in the title since this contravenes our copyright & trademarks.

    Martyn Brown,
    Team17 Software Limited.
    -----------------------------------------------------------

3) As you just read, Team17 exlicitly forbid us to use the
    word "Worms" in the game title. That's why we changed it to
    "Wörms of Prey" (I don't know if the "Umlaut" in
    the first word is displayed right, just look on the
    homepage to see the correct spelling). So far, Team17
    does not seem to mind, but if you want to stand clear
    of any trademark problems, you should use "WoP" (or
    "Wörms of Prey" if you dare).


Regarding the sound issue, I see three options (the first
I like most, the last one least):
a) keeping the Team17 sounds; they allowed us to do so.
b) replacing the sounds (maybe with Wormux sounds)
c) no sounds at all (except for the intro tune which is
    not from Team17 and we are allowed to use it).

I'm pretty sure that the two other developers have a similar
opinion about this issue.

Let's hopel that all this trademark stuff is not a showstopper,
because Debian is my favorite Linux distro and I would just love
to see WoP on the official Debian servers. We really appreciate
your work! Thanks!

Cheers,
Tom


Gonéri Le Bouder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We, the Debian Games Team, wish to see wop in Debian. But saddly we have a 
> major issue with the sound files that come from Team17's Worms and want to 
> remove them. We are no allowed to publish them.
> 
> Do you have planned to purge these files? If so, Wormux sounds should be a 
> good alternative.
> 
> Today, wop works fine without these. Do you have an objection if we release 
> wop 0.4.3 in Debian without these files?
> 
> The discussion on our mailing list:
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-games-devel/2006-December/002738.html
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> 	Gonéri
> Ps: Can you please keep the pkg-games-devel list in Cc: