Background
Robert Rühlmann took over maintainership of
Angband in 2000, where he did a huge amount of work that culminated in the release of version 3.0, thanks to a plethora of changes to the objects and monsters contributed by
Jonathan Ellis. The
Lua scripting language was added at this stage too, enabling additions to be made to the game by scripting, as opposed to recompiling the code - this addition wasn't greeted so well by the Angband userbase, whose concern saw the removal of this at a later date by another maintainer.
The
Angband Open Source Initiative was started by
Robert Rühlmann during his maintainership, where the intention was to place Angband under the
GNU General Public License - the original licenses of Angband and it's descendant
Moria allowed distribution, but also had a clause which prevented it from being distributed at a profit, which thus prevented it's inclusion in the likes of Linux distributions and magazine cover discs. The license essentially didn't allow code modification either, which had obviously been ignored by the community as a whole. The effort to relicense the game was started in 2000, but wasn't completed until the beginning of January 2009 - the sheer number of people involved in the games development over the years, along with code provided to port the game to different platforms, along with their predecessors - it became quite a list.
Robert Rühlmann stepped down as maintainer in October 2005, where Angband remained in limbo for several months.
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