It may be interesting whether this mess of licenses are actually enforceable in this form.
My conclusion is that although not very strongly, but yes. If for nothing else, the RRPGE specification contains a set of important data which, if used (by implementations, by applications), will clearly enforce the licensing terms. Otherwise as of now there is no other implementation than mine, covered by the RRPGE License. The relation between the emulator and applications can be understood as a relation between a library and the users of the library on which term GPL is also in effect.
Of course these relations are not exactly strong, they are even risky if someone with a strong support would try to circumvent them. To make things more robust, three additional measures may be relied upon:
- The correct use of the RRPGE Logo (currently under trademark registration). No dragon, it is not RRPGE, get lost.
- The use of the RRPGE License. This license applied on RRPGE applications and code fragments will keep those for us to use.
- Walled garden products may not allow for a generic RRPGE host. Be first, and be the best in providing a compile-together (the application and a specialized host) solution for those, of course under the RRPGE License.
For the future however I plan a fallback if it is necessary to keep RRPGE consistent. This would mean by owning the copyright for those murky sections of the RRPGE specification which weakly enforce this trail of licensing, I might lift the strong copyleft on those, but only those parts by issuing them separately for example under Lesser GPL. The specification itself of course remains as-is, under the RRPGE License. But until this will really be necessary, I would left it this way to give us at least a head-start.
