Which License?

[lemmy04]

Hi,
I'm packaging zork (as dungeon, re: trademarks) for openSUSE, and "Public domain" is not in the list of recognized licenses... which one from https://spdx.org/licenses/ do I put in my spec file?

[devshane]

Hi. Sorry I can't be of more help but I'm not sure; public domain doesn't require a license as far as I know.

Maybe something from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_license?

[willxy]

Looking around, I found this:

https://opensuse-packaging.opensuse.narkive.com/7ulzl2g8/what-s-the-new-spdx-name-for-a-public-domain-license

Although, it's from 7 years ago; but I didn't find anything newer.

[rdalkire]

I see that this is topic is closed, but it's not super clear from just looking through these files that this is public domain; AFAIK Activision still owns the Zork brand, and there really needs to be an explicit FOSS license to indicate that the source code is free-to-use. See answers to What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license? at opensource.stackexchange.com. The MIT license is the best and most open, in my opinion.

[devshane]

I'm just going by what's in the README.

Public Domain source code to the original DUNGEON game (Zork I). Released to the PD 
by Infocom. Includes source files, headers, and information.

Unfortunately, I don't have any more insight than that. Frankly, I don't even remember where I found this source. I had a nostalgic hankering one afternoon, found it, created a Slack bot with it, and the next thing I knew it somehow became the canonical repo for Homebrew.

I don't feel like the code is "mine" to license.