Remove the legalese from start.exe?

[Dan Kegel]

When I wrote that bit, I was simply trying to follow the letter
of the LGPL.  I'm ok with any solution that does that.
So making the messages uniform is fine by me.
- Dan

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr> wrote:
>
> Start has the following lines at the end of its usage message:
>
>   "start.exe version 0.2 Copyright (C) 2003, Dan Kegel\n"
>   "Start comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details run with /L option.\n"
>   "This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it\n"
>   "under certain conditions; run 'start /L' for details.\n"
>
> And also this resource:
>   "start.exe version 0.2 Copyright (C) 2003, Dan Kegel\n"
>   "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or\n"
>   "modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public License\n"
>   "as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1\n"
>   [...]
>   "along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software\n"
>   "Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.\n"
>   "\n"
>   "See the COPYING.LIB file for license information.\n"
>
> We also have another copy of this copyright notice in shell32 for the
> 'About Wine' dialog but without the 'start.exe' and 'COPYING.LIB' lines,
> and with 'This program' replaced with 'Wine'.
>
>
> One more copyright notice we have is this in msrle32.rc:
>
>   "Wine MS-RLE video codec\n"
>   "Copyright 2002 by Michael Guennewig"
>
>
> Now this is all legalese which is a pain to translate (weird vocabulary)
> and pretty scary too. And because of the small differences the copyright
> notice needs to be translated twice (though tools like Virtaal/Launchpad
> may notice the similarity and prefill a fuzzy translation). Also
> start.exe and msrle32.dll are the only ones to have these notices which
> seems pretty inconsistent.
>
>
> So what can we do to make this simpler?
>
> The simplest would be to remove all copyright notices from start.rc and
> msrle32.rc. (we would keep the ones in the source of course). I guess
> that would require Dan's and Michael's approval.
>
>
> The other options involve separating the strings that change from one
> tool to the next, from those that stay the same. This way the latter
> will only appear once in the PO file and thus need to be translated only
> once. The various parts can then trivially be concatenated when they are
> displayed. (unfortunately this does not help for the msrle32.rc case)
>
>
> For instance we could decide to only keep the 'COPYING.LIB' string and
> tack it to the end of the usage message. We could also make things more
> consistent by doing this in every tool. So in pseudo-code we would have
> something like this:
>
>    /* Load the tool-specific usage message */
>    usage_message = load_string(IDS_USAGE);
>
>    /* Load the generic copying.lib reference. This one is duplicated in
>     * every tool but always the same.
>     */
>    copying_reference = load_string(IDS_COPYING);
>
>    /* Print both */
>    printf(usage_message);
>    printf(copying_reference);
>
>
> Another option would be to reuse the exact same main copyright notice as
> in the About Wine dialog since we need to translate that anyway (I think
> it would work wrapping-wise). So the start.exe pseudo-code for showing
> the license would be something like this:
>
>    /* Load the copyright notice header, that is:
>     *   start.exe version 0.2 Copyright (C) 2003, Dan Kegel
>     *   start.exe is part of Wine.
>     */
>    notice_header = load_string(IDS_NOTICE_HEADER);
>
>    /* Load the generic Wine copyright notice. Note that it
>     * says 'Wine' like in the 'About Wine' dialog, not 'This program'
>     * and would be the same in any other Wine tool:
>     *    Wine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
>     *    ...
>     */
>    notice_generic = load_string(IDS_NOTICE_GENERIC);
>
>    /* Load the copyright notice trailer:
>     *
>     *    See the COPYING.LIB file for license information.
>     */
>    notice_trailer = load_string(IDS_NOTICE_TRAILER);
>
>    /* Print all the parts together */
>    printf(notice_header);
>    printf(notice_generic);
>    printf(notice_trailer);
>
>
> --
> Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
>          tcA thgirypoC muinelliM latigiD eht detaloiv tsuj evah uoY
>