Licenses

[pcpa]

There is some form of arrangement with CGTextures, according to the file fcxSanya linked to:

Is there some link to this agreement? It would help i my Fedora review request for 0ad-data.

Just in case, probably known by 0ad artists :-), when googling for more information, I found this post http://glest.org/glest_board/index.php?topic=7106.msg72926#msg72926 comenting about http://www.burningwell.org/ as a safer source of textures.

[fcxSanya]

Is there some link to this agreement? It would help i my Fedora review request for 0ad-data.

No, there is no link since it was an email conversation with CGTextures' Marcel Vijfwinkel.

I see you have a confirmation on Red Hat Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=823102#c11 , so it should be ok now.

[Pureon]

Can we use Fedora's confirmation email from CGTextures to backup any future queries, and if so document it in LICENSE.txt in some way?

[pcpa]

Can we use Fedora's confirmation email from CGTextures to backup any future queries, and if so document it in LICENSE.txt in some way?

I attached the unmodified messages as in "Show Original" then "Save As" from gmail, to my Fedora 0ad-data review request.

[luziferius]

About Debian:

Does Debian have a 'multiverse' repository like ubuntu?

if yes, the worst thing that afaik can happen to 0ad is that it gets moved into that repository together with other not so legally clear content.

the only downside is that multiverse has to be manually enabled.

[zoot]

Debian has a repository called 'non-free' that does roughly the same as 'multiverse'.

[historic_bruno]

I mentioned this in myconid's graphics topic, but I'll add it here as well. While most of the contents of source/ are authored by us and GPL licensed, there are a few exceptions not yet listed in LICENSE.txt:

source/third_party/mongoose/ (MIT)

source/graphics/mikktspace.* (zlib)

source/graphics/weldmesh.* (zlib)

Any others?

The above are GPL compatible but we should explicitly list them so nobody incorrectly assumes they are GPL or the work of WFG (without reading the files themselves). I would suggest a) moving mikktspace.* and weldmesh.* to source/third_party/mikktspace and source/third_party/weldmesh for organization purposes, and mentioning the contents of source/third_party in LICENSE.txt.

Edit: started update of LICENSE.txt by removing wxjs and adding Mongoose

Edited September 13, 2012 by historic_bruno
Moved from Art Dev forum

[historic_bruno]

No, there is no link since it was an email conversation with CGTextures' Marcel Vijfwinkel.

I see you have a confirmation on Red Hat Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=823102#c11 , so it should be ok now.

It raises a good point though. Is it going to be necessary to contact CGTextures every time someone wants to confirm this agreement? What if they go out of business or suddenly change their mind? Why don't we have this somewhere in writing?

The other example is the wolf textures for those Roman units. Someone on the team saying it's "OK" isn't very strong evidence when the law is involved.

[Jeru]

We should save our correspondence somewhere safe.

[zoot]

We should save our correspondence somewhere safe.

This is the type of thing I'm convinced the Software Freedom Law Center can help with. They are smart people - the guy who founded it is basically the author of the latest version of the GPL license (GPLv3) - and they have tons of experience helping Wordpress, GNOME, KDE and many other major open source projects. If nothing else, they can give advice on how formal things need (or don't need) to be.

[historic_bruno]

Relevant licensing question, what's our license for content added to Trac? I ask because it's conceivable people will want to know that before using information from it, someone might create a page and then refuse to allow it to be copied, etc. If we have one, it should be stated clearly, if we don't, we should decide on one (I guess some type of Creative Commons license would be best)

[Jeru]

I think CC-BY-SA, like the game art assets, and like Wikipedia articles, should be fine.

[feneur]

I don't think we have anything explicitly stated no, but yeah CC-BY-SA should probably be the best, especially since we already use it so it's not yet another license to remember

[zoot]

If we have one, it should be stated clearly, if we don't, we should decide on one (I guess some type of Creative Commons license would be best)

I agree. It might also be a good idea for the forum, since people sometimes post art content there without necessarily having given explicit permission for reuse. Just a non-intrusive notice, like the one on Wikipedia's submission form.

[feneur]

I agree. It might also be a good idea for the forum, since people sometimes post art content there without necessarily having given explicit permission for reuse. Just a non-intrusive notice, like the one on Wikipedia's submission form.

I don't think we should ask people to allow reuse of everything they post on the forums though, so we need to be clear about what we're talking about. Maybe you're talking specifically about the Development forum though which would be a lot clearer? (Might still be a bit ambiguous as people might post e.g. reference images which they have no right to give any rights to us etc, but should be clearer than having something for the entire forums or something )

[zoot]

I don't think we should ask people to allow reuse of everything they post on the forums though

Frankly, why not? Would anyone mind? I mean, we're smart, but it's not like every word we utter is a patentable trade secret It would only apply to content created by the poster, of course, so things like reference images from other sources would be unaffected.

[historic_bruno]

OK if the consensus is CC-by-SA, the next question is do we have to ask all past Trac contributors if they're ok with us adding this license, or can we just ignore that unpleasant little detail? Maybe we can say it had an implicit CC-by-SA-compatible license all along since it's a wiki

Then let's get some code for the Trac templates with CC logo(s)/link(s) and shoot them off to Philip fcxSanya was doing some related work on Trac here (staff forum).

[MishFTW]

It seems like a good idea to let the users know via email of an update in the policy.

[zoot]

OK if the consensus is CC-by-SA, the next question is do we have to ask all past Trac contributors if they're ok with us adding this license, or can we just ignore that unpleasant little detail?

Technically, they should. However, to the extent that the content in wiki will not be used directly in the release, I guess it is a lesser concern, because it can just be removed if someone complains.

[quantumstate]

I don't think was can just retroactively re-license the wiki content. It would be a massive pain to go through and check things though. The best solution for me would be to have a way to mark pages as being CC-by-SA, initially we could no pages would have this status but then we would gradually convert them.

[fcxSanya]

Then let's get some code for the Trac templates with CC logo(s)/link(s) and shoot them off to Philip fcxSanya was doing some related work on Trac here (staff forum).

On Wikipedia there is the license info in the footer:

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.

And notification on the edit form:

By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL.

You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.

We can do both things with Trac by modifying the site.html and wiki_edit_form.html templates respectively. Better to implement those changes and merge them together with the top secret staff forum thing you mentioned before sending to Philip, to not bother him twice.

Required changes are small and easily testable on a local Trac installation (which is very simple to install too), I can do them myself, but currently I even more busy than usually (moving to another project on work), so I don't know how fast it would be. Surely I don't mind if someone else will look at this, but please state it explicitly in this case, to not repeat the same work twice.