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I'd say we're prepared to public domain everything we've done as shareware. I don't know how to make that legal, but there you go.
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Releasing a program under public domain must be done through a notary. Doing so would relinquish any control, ownership or copyright you hold over the game.
A simpler means of achieving free redistributability of the program would be just changing the license, allowing you to retain the copyrights for any future use. According to
this article, including an appropriate licensing document with the software pretty much takes care of that.
To give you something to work from, here is a copy of a release note included by Apogee in their freeware re-release of Caves of Thor:
Code:
Caves of Thor Release Notes - December 2005
Caves of Thor is (c)1989/2005 Apogee Software, Ltd.
---------------------------------------------------
This game was deleted from Apogee's product line quite a long time ago, and
has been re-released as freeware in December of 2005. There are a few notes
you should be aware of with the release.
1) We offer no support in helping to getting this freeware release running.
You are on your own in getting it working.
2) Each episode needs to be run seperately. The respective commands for
each episode are caves.exe (Ep1), realm.exe (Ep2), & revenge.exe (Ep3).
3) This game does not handle modern computers very well, and as such
requires a third party program to help your computer adapt to the game
better. We strongly recommend the use of MoSlo, a program that can make
a program think the computer is slower. We have a demo version of this
program in the "Miscellaneous Files" section of our downloads page here:
http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html
4) The offer for source code mentioned inside the game no longer exists; no
one lives at the addresses mentioned in the documentation. Please do not
try and contact anyone at these places - if someone is there, it's
not us, you'll just be bothering someone who has no idea what you're
talking about.
5) This game is released as freeware. That's not to be confused with
public domain, abandonware (which is illegal), or releasing something
under the GPL. This is a freeware release, which means we retain full
legal rights to the title and it's materials. You are free to play the
game as we've released it, but not free to "do whatever you want with
it", which includes selling it or otherwise using the materials for your
own gain.
Enjoy Caves of Thor!
-- Apogee Tech Support, December 2005
license
A generalized fill-in-the-blanks version would be something like this:
Code:
<title> Release Notes - <current date>
<title> is (c) <original release year>/<current year> <copyright holder>
---------------------------------------------------
This game was discontinued from our product line a long time ago, and
has been re-released as freeware in <current date>. There are a few notes
you should be aware of with the release.
1) We offer no support for this freeware release.
2) This game was not produced with modern computers in mind. You may
need a third party program such as DOSBox (http://dosbox.com/) to run it
properly on modern computers.
3) This game is released as freeware. That's not to be confused with
public domain, abandonware or GPL. This is a freeware release, which
means we retain full legal rights to the title and it's materials. You
are free to play the game as we've released it, but not free to "do
whatever you want with it", which includes selling it or otherwise using
the materials for your own gain.
-- <copyright holder>, <current date>