This is a Debian prepackaged version of the shareware abuse sound effects.
This package was put together by Joey Hess , using
sources from:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/abuse/abuse200.zip
Author: Bobby Prince
I contacted the author in May 2004 about the licensing:
> Hello, I am a member of the Debian project (http://www.debian.org/)
> which aims to build a free, full-featured operating system. By
> "free", we basically mean that the user gets a right to use,
> modify and redistribute (even resell) the software at will
> (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines).
>
> The old Abuse game, for which you created the sound effects,
> was released to the public domain by Crack.com, which means we can
> distribute it with Debian. However we cannot distribute the sound files
> because they still have your exclusive copyright with no redistribution
> clause. Would you be favourable to relicensing these sound effects so
> that we can distribute Abuse? If you have special requirements and are
> not fond of public domain, we can discuss a license that will please
> you while being free for Debian.
This is the answer I got on May 16th 2004:
> While the sfx are not in the public domain, you have my permission to use
> them for your purposes below. I'll check your operating system out -- it
> sounds interesting :-)
Though the meaning of "your purposes below" is not entirely clear, this
clearly gives permission to redistribute the files. I asked the author for
clarification (and proposed to use a BSD-like license) but have not got an
answer so far.