# Notice, credits and provenance

## What this is

An independent reimplementation of the lemonade-stand business simulation that
went round schools and home computers from the 1970s onward, written from
scratch in TypeScript in 2026.

## Credit where it is due

- **Bob Jamison**, Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), 1973 —
  wrote the original *Lemonade Stand* for time-shared systems.
- **Charlie Kellner**, 1979 — wrote the Apple II version that most people
  actually remember, distributed by Apple Computer.
- Every magazine and type-in book that carried a listing of it, which is how a
  lot of us first met the thing.

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to MECC, its
successors, or Apple. No original source code was used, consulted or copied.

## How this code came to exist

Clean-room, and worth being specific about because it is what makes the licence
below meaningful:

- **The simulation is ours.** The demand curve, the weather profiles, the sign
  returns and the event probabilities in `src/game/constants.ts` are a
  reconstruction, tuned by running several hundred headless seasons until the
  game *behaved* the way it is remembered. It is not the original arithmetic,
  and it is documented as a reconstruction in the source.
- **The rules are not ours to own.** Buy glasses, buy signs, set a price, read
  the weather — game mechanics are ideas rather than expression, and nobody
  gets to fence them off. We use them freely and so may you.
- **The artwork and the music are ours.** Every pixel is SVG drawn in code and
  every note is generated by the synth in `src/audio/`. There are no imported
  assets of any kind.

## What is and is not ours

**All of it is ours, with two narrow exceptions noted below.**

Earlier drafts of this project reproduced some of the original's on-screen
wording from memory — the welcome, the report heading, the thunderstorm and
road-works messages. That text was someone else's writing, and a project
released under a copyleft licence has no business licensing words it did not
write. Every one of those passages has since been rewritten in our own voice.
Nothing quoted remains.

Two things are still not original, and neither is a copyright question:

- **The setting.** The town is still Lemonsville, California. Names and short
  titles are not subject to copyright, and it is kept deliberately, as the one
  visible nod to where the game came from.
- **The ledger's labels.** `GLASSES SOLD`, `COST OF SIGNS`, `PROFIT` and the
  rest are the only sensible words for what they label, and the order they
  appear in follows from the arithmetic. There is no creative expression in
  them to own.

Everything else — the simulation, the artwork, the music, the interface and
every word on screen — was written for this project and is covered by the
licence below.

## Licence

Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the **GNU Affero General Public License** as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).

AGPL rather than plain GPL because the leaderboard is a network service: §13
means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network
has to offer them its source. Running the game without the scores service is
entirely supported and imposes nothing extra.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

*None of the above is legal advice.*