Legal status of Hugo?

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Tue Nov 15, 2016 1:47 am

I think one question that comes up or should have, is "what is the legal status of Hugo?"

Technically everyone who has a copy of the sources and the executable binaries has an illegal bootleg copy of the system since there is no indication anyone has a license for this product.

Now, if someone has confirmation from Kent Tessman that he has released it as BSD (which seems to be how it is being treated) then that's okay. If not, the terms under which it has been released should be made clear.

I mean, if anyone actually tried playing my game Tripkey, it says in the startup that it is licensed under V2 of the GPL. With Patty Flinger it didn't matter because since I wrote it as a work for hire I don't own it, it's up to ICJ to decide how he was distributing it.

As it stands now anyone who would want to use Hugo to release a program potentially for sale has no valid title or license for the run-time system or even the compiler.

For most open source language translators the compiler or interpreter is usually licensed on a "share equally" basis like GPL (or "do anything" under BSD), and to allow commercial use of the product in developed applications that are not open source, the runtime library is licensed LGPL or BSD.

For the few closed source commercial / freeware compilers (like the latest version of Visual Basic or Visual C++) there is an explicit license on the "redistributables" indicating what can be included with distributed applications.

But in the case of Hugo there really is no official guideline as to what its status is other than apparently the gray area of "abandonware."

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Tue Nov 15, 2016 3:23 pm

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/realn ... icense.txt

Dannii · Post by **Dannii** » Sat Mar 04, 2017 3:38 am

Kent posted a 2 Clause BSD license here: http://develop.generalcoffee.com/hugo/t ... icense.txt

Now this repository seems to have version 3.2 of Hugo. I'm planning a port of the Hugo interpreter, would it be safe to use this code?

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Sat Mar 04, 2017 3:50 am

Have you emailed Kent? He was very responsive when I contacted him about license stuff.

Dannii · Post by **Dannii** » Sat Mar 04, 2017 3:55 am

Not yet, but I probably will soon. I was just curious if anyone here had experience with version 3.2, because none of the Hugo websites I've seen have mentioned it.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 12:58 am

Huh, I had completely missed that development.