Remove the legalese from start.exe?

[Dan Kegel]

Oh, and dropping the bogus version number from start.exe is fine, too.
(Presumably inserting wine's version number would be better,
if we want a version number there.)

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:35 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>