History/History.txt


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This directory is intended to document the history of Beyond The Titanic and 
provide documentation of how it became free software.

Beyond The Titanic was originally written by Scott Miller in the 1980s. Going 
off of the copyright notices in the source code he began in 1984. The game 
was originally proprietary.

Later, Scott Miller was one of the founders of Apogee Software, Ltd. in 
1987 [0].

According to the corporate timeline [1] Beyond The Titanic was published in 
1986 before Apogee started and then released as freeware (but still 
proprietary) in 1998 [2]. In 2009 Apogee Software released the source code 
under the GPL [3].

Based on the comments made in the announcement [3] and in the readme.txt that 
came with the game [4] it appears that they were putting it under the GPL as 
part of their process to throw the code over the wall to forget about. They 
even just added the part of it being GPLed underneath the previous text from 
where the game had been released as freeware in 1998.

In reviewing the license headers in their release [5] there are copyright 
notices from Apogee Software so it appears that Scott Miller transferred his 
copyright to Apogee at some point. This make sense since he was one of the 
founders of the company and the game had been distributed as an Apogee 
program. Also, the license headers indicated it was specifically released 
under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. I took 
advantage of that to upgrade it to the GNU General Public License version 3 
or any later version. The modifications are licensed under the GNU Affero 
General Public License version 3 or any later version. This combination of 
GPLv3 or later and AGPLv3 or later is permitted under section 13 of each 
license.

[0] See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=3D_Realms&oldid=605663632
[1] See the file timeline.png or visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.3drealms.com/history.html
[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 
[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
[4] See readme.txt in this directory.
[5] See the initial commit in this git repository or ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/tit_free.zip