TADS

TADS was a shareware system written in the 1980s, at the height of the retail home computer software market for this sort of thing. It has often been characterized as being aimed more toward people who are used to programming, and is praised for its brevity. It has a longer history of hobbyist games by virtue of being the older of the two major authorship systems, but many of these games pre-date the formation of a cohesive community.

TADS was released as "freeware" in the 1990s, and there have been irregular publications of full source code. The tads3 source distribution's LICENSE.TXT file permits redistribution, restricts publication of modified versions to changes required for "porting" the software, and forbids commercial use of the sources.

The restrictions on modification and fields of endeavor disqualify it under The Open Source Definition or The Debian Free Software Guidelines, keeping it from being distributed as part of a free operating system. Many people accept the license and write great IF with it, but I cannot in good conscience join them.

Inform

Inform is an entirely different sort of beast from TADS, and it has a far more dramatic history. In the early 1990s, Graham Nelson set about reverse-engineering the virtual machine that Infocom used to make porting its games simpler. He also produced a compiler that could produce binaries for this Z-machine, and included some libraries that were useful for writing IF for this VM.

The fact that Inform compiles to the same format that Infocom used gave it a certain cachet, and a community gelled around the software and the language. While TADS developers tended to be programmers wanting to make games, Inform developers often included more of a sort of starry-eyed 1990s medialab type. [3] These folks saw IF as a way to develop new interactive forms of literature and create art. They were authors looking to add interactivity to their creations.

The division isn't quite as clear-cut as the previous paragraph might imply, but the current community of avant-garde IF authors came into its own as Inform developed. Many of the titans of the genre these days use Inform to the exclusion of other systems.

The licensing for this system is a far more complicated question. The license under which most versions of Inform were released had similar constraints to that of TADS: modified versions could not be redistributed if they were "substantially different" from the official version, and "profit" was forbidden. [4]

Since Inform was such a community effort, the libraries of functions that might compile into a final story file were under a real mess of permissions. Some had no license, and thus it would behoove any user of these libraries to request specific permission to publish any story that uses them. Some were under "public domain" licenses, occasionally with explanations of what permissions this included for the benefit of countries that are not the United States.

The libraries remain a sticky problem: you compile them into your own stories, making your resulting IF a derivative work. If the licenses for the libraries do not permit modified works or commercial use, then you need to explicitly request permission for the right to either of these for your story. The core libraries written by Nelson had an exception to allow users to sell their own games, but not all library authors followed this example.

This situation remained up until Inform 6. Things changed when Inform 7 hit the net. Inform 7 is a radical departure for Inform in many ways. It takes the view of IF as fiction first and foremost, and drives it to its logical conclusion: stories are written in a declarative rules-driven syntax based on modern English. It has the potential to introduce IF authorship to a wider audience than ever would have been possible before.

Unlike all previous versions of Inform, Nelson did not publish his sources as he went. To date, most of v7 is unavailable in source code form, and one downloads binaries built by members of the core development team.

Summary of Software

One other thing that has caused this to get swept under the rug a little is that there are plenty of TADS and Z-machine story file interpreters out there. It's hard to explain to anyone who only ever plays IF on free software that it's all built on proprietary foundations.

So here's what we have as free software now:

• TADS runtimes
• Z-machine runtimes
• Inform 6N compiler
• Inform 6N template
• The GNOME User Interface for Inform7
• The cblorb IF packaging tool
• The Inform 7 Standard Rules

Here are the key pieces we're lacking:

• The Inform 6 Library
• the pre-6N compiler, if that matters
• ni, the Inform 7 compiler

The first piece would be necessary to get a DFSG-free Inform 6 toolchain, and the second would be required to make a DFSG-free Inform 7 toolchain.

My People

I consider myself a relatively dedicated supporter of free software as described and advocated by the Free Software Foundation. I believe that software holds a unique position in its status as both communication and functional work, and that this requires a rethinking of how copyright and patent law currently treat it. I am a big fan of the commons that the GNU GPL and other "copyleft" licenses have created by setting copyright on its own tail.

Since this stance covers issues of freedom of speech, education, sharing, helping your neighbor and so forth, it has become something of a moral conviction for me. Naturally, when anyone hears that you have such a conviction they will attempt to tease you with contrived dilemmas as though their very existence somehow "debunked" your moral code. [6] The interesting dilemma here is that of games and spoilers.

I have a reasonably relaxed view on games and free software, although I'm led to understand that it's one I share with Richard Stallman himself. Basically it falls under the old parenting maxim of "no secrets: only surprises". I am not saddened by an inability to easily dig out the solution to a game. The important moral question to me is the functional aspect of the game–the engine, basically. The world doesn't need to learn the location of the macguffin in your story before playing it through, but it should learn how you implemented the clever NPC engine that the story relied on.

I see a fair number of My People in the IF community, let it be said. For starters there's a fair amount of free software IF. [7] One of the big names in really clever IF, Andrew Plotkin (or "zarf", if you like) has published all the sources for his major works. Adam Thornton may be found in newsgroup archives making encouraging noises toward DFSG-free licensing and promising Debian packages when that day comes.

Retailists

Another common perspective in these sorts of discussions is that of the software author who expects to be paid ultimately from end-user license fees. This is something of a long story, but basically in the 1980s Microsoft lobbied the US Congress to get software covered under copyright. Previously it was considered too functional to be copyrightable and too abstract to be patentable.

What resulted was a short period when people actually went to shops and put down money to take home a box of software. This still happens a lot, but it's nowhere near as total as it once was. For some people, this model is the only right and true path, and they get irritated when some punk kid who doesn't have any serious sales under his belt starts talking about sharing.

I must admit that My People have often been impolite when confronted by this perspective. It's not uncommon for a bunch of shouting to fly back and forth, and the Retailist in question fires the usual "why do you want me to starve" rant and everybody leaves unhappy.

I'm not sure how common this is in IF, but it showed up as a theme in Get Lamp a surprising number of times. Despite most of the interviews ending with admonitions that IF would never be the retail success it was in the 1980s, there still appear to be people trying to live out their dreams of becoming the next Infocom. I feel that this sentiment is at least somewhat responsible for the plague of "non-commercial use only" licenses in IF.

It is interesting to note Plotkin as a counterexample here: he recently solicited donations to sponsor him for some interesting IF projects. He asked for $8k and left the donation period open for a month, but received $15k on the first day alone. This is someone who is not wedded to the 1980s publishing model for software, to be sure!

I am going to make a rather harsh prediction: Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 will make more money than any efforts to sell IF licenses to end-users over the next decade.

Auteurs

Of course the Retailists and My People are kind of a sideline here. If either one had taken the fore, the licensing situation would have been extremely clear-cut. Instead what we got was something of an amalgam. The modern IF toolset was built up by a community of proud Auteurs.

I mentioned earlier that Inform attracted a lot of 1990s medialab types. These were folks who didn't come with ideas about free software, but they saw themselves as using new tools to bring forth their creative visions. They shared with one another in a spirit of free expression, but did not have the history of license development that My People had. Consider for example this outright editorial rejection of the authority of the Open Source Definition. [8]

This is where most of the disconnects seem to come from. As you dig around discussion archives and look at licenses, you find that (aside from the odd restrictions on commerce) there are two concerns on the Auteur's mind that prevent them from freely embracing DFSG-free licenses.

1. Being misrepresented
2. Artistic control

These are not unreasonable things to be nervous about, but I maintain that neither is the sort of thing that requires a hammer as large as copyright law to defend.

The issue of confusion and misrepresentation is one that many DFSG-free licenses do manage, and the Artistic License in particular requires that it be made clear when a program has been significantly modified from that provided by the original copyright holder. This is likely to be the reason why this license was chosen above all others on opensource.org.

In one of the original announcements for Inform 7, Emily Short touched on both of the above concerns:

It has been pointed out that the current license for NI and Inform 6 is arguably not broad enough for Linux norms (for instance, some distros would not allow I6 to be shipped with their releases). We are willing to re-address this: the decision has been postponed for now. While Inform will probably not move to the GPL, it may well move to an open source license granting freedom for derivative works but requiring that such works may only call themselves "Inform" if they comply with a reference set of behaviour - something like the TeX license, in fact. We certainly do not intend licensing issues to present any difficulty to Inform's users, and the only rights we wish to retain are the moral rights of authorship over the design of the language.

The matter of artistic control is a subtle one. It certainly ties in with the user confusion about whose software is actually running, but it goes a bit deeper than that. In one SPAG interview Graham Nelson said:

Had Inform 7 been developed in open source, I am fairly sure it would now be an elaborated version of the superficial prototype, and that it would be much the poorer. And it ought to be remembered that for at least the first year of the project, I wasn't at all sure it would ever work - "work" in the sense of being capable enough to be useful.

I do not quite buy the argument put by Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", that the bustling, self-organised world of the bazaar gets things built better and faster than the secretive clergy.

You see this conversation repeated a lot. Basically Graham is just trying to avoid the bikeshedding and keep control, and the best arguments he's getting from My People about sharing his source code under DFSG-free licenses seem to devolve into quoting Eric S. Raymond of all people.

Of course Nelson's anxieties do not come from ignorance, but from experience. In the Inform 6 development history Nelson notes:

Something that partially frustrated this was that Inform acquired a serious user base "too soon", before the language design was mature enough: by Inform 4, a good many people were using Inform, and this began to make me nervous of changing the established syntax. But if a syntax feature is clearly "wrong" (that is, anomalous and inconvenient) then clearly one must bite the bullet and make a change. In retrospect, I feel I have always been too hesitant over this.

Graham Nelson knows how he works and how communities affect the way he develops software. For this reason, he is unlikely to be moved by claims of practical improvements that were originally written for a more corporate audience.