The software was originally developed by Robert Woodcock . It was also debianized by Robert Woodcock on Sun, 21 Feb 1999 18:50:34 -0800. It is available at: https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/ Copyright: Copyright (c) 1998-2001 Robert Woodcock Copyright (c) 2003-2009 Jesus Climent Copyright (c) 2009-2012 Colin Tuckley Copyright (c) 2012- Steve McIntyre Copyright (c) 2015- Andrew Strong and many other contributors This code is hereby licensed for public consumption under either the GNU GPL v2 or greater, or Larry Wall's Artistic license - your choice. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. An earlier abcde copyright included the text: Copyright for this work is to expire January 1, 2010, after which it shall be public domain. However, later versions (2.6 onwards) have been developed solely using the GPL. Earlier versions are still available in various places if you'd rather have the public domain code. See /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2