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[Ciehoo]

I may be wrong about this, and even if I am right it is probably irrellevant but:
The fact that this is released under a global public licence means that if we make this project and it works well and everyone likes it and then toady gets to the presentation arc...
It would be nice if toady could use this. He has always been against doing such things and it is highly unlikely that he would want to use it but still it seems good to leave it open as an option.
Again I might be wrong about this, it is possible that Ciehoo doesn't want to hand this project over to Toady free of charge or doesn't want it used as an official part of DF but I doubt this.
What I am proposing is a new type of licence that I dont know has ever been tried before: GPL exception. So put a disclaimer in that if Toady specifically as an entity wants to use any or all of this code in a proprietary project he does not have to open the source of that project, or make it free. I don't know much about copyright law but I think that the current licence doesnt actually mean he has to open source to use it. But it still forces him to keep the game free. Mind you that might be a good thing.
Thoughts anyone? I am probably just talking out of my arse.

LGPL doesn't force anyone to do anything with his code provided the LGPL'd work is used as a dynamically linked library. If, at any point in time, Toady decides to incorporate the library into the game, he'd be free to do so ( of course he would have to release any changes he made to the library itself). 

The easiest way out would be to add a classic DLL interface which would provide an alternate path through the code, one that would not use raw memory access hacks. After that it would be a matter of adding the following code to the start of Dwarf Fortress.exe:

Code: [Select]

if (handle = LoadLibrary("OgreDwarf.dll") )
{
// setup and call the dll code
}
else
{
// run the classic version
}

And it would have the benefit of making the mod more stable and version independent (just thought about the changes between .38 and 40d - there were binary differences in the data structures between those - so no can do without syncing headers).   

[Andir]

The fact that this is released under a global public licence means that if we make this project and it works well and everyone likes it and then toady gets to the presentation arc...

Also, GPL is not global public license, it's GNU General Public License.  It's a minor nitpick.  Sorry.