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You Do Not Need to Buy 0 A.D. on eBay


Jeru
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Also, he may already be in violation of the CC-BY-SA 3.0, because it states:

"... by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties."

and:

"... if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation."

Of course, only a judge would be able to make the final decision as to whether either of those terms have actually been violated.

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Okay time to report this idiot... I'm sorry I just don't like his whole scam operation going on. Yes he is technically allowed to sell 0 AD and scam people. But what about the other items? And besides, its just morally wrong. Just the kind of thing to make a dent in the OS movement. Just plain disgusting.

Oh, and I agree that we should restrict the selling of third party binaries...

And a note on the main menu saying "If you paid money for this game, you got scammed. Get the updated version for free at www.wildfiregames.com". ;)

This could be bypassed by editing the files.

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Such restrictions are against the GPL (and unnecessary).

By restrict I meant not via license per se but just by asking them to take it down. Also once 0 A.D. is finished, I don't see any harm in having an official CD distribution store (the game gets distributed to people without fast Internet and its good publicity). Also having an official CD prevents people from being scammed into buying the incomplete game.

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Already discussed about this before, its better for the wfg team to cooperate with independent vendors by cooperating with them earlier.

Some profits goes to the vendors, some goes to support the game.

Anything can be monetized, the problem is how to manage it to support the spirit of fairness.

http://www.wildfireg...showtopic=15256

Edited by majapahit
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I wonder if we couldn't actually in the art license require distributors to state something like "This product can be freely downloaded from www.wildfiregames.com" in any 'sales presentations' they give. GPL won't let you add such clauses for the code/binaries, but CC-BY-SA will.

I've taken this idea up on the debian-legal mailing list. In short, to be included in major Linux distributions like Debian, our software (including art) needs to grant users a certain amount of freedom to do with it what they want. The people on debian-legal couldn't come up with a really compelling reason that a clause like the above would be too restrictive, but they weren't positive about it either. This leads me to believe that adding such a restriction on the off-chance that we might bust a petty eBay vendor or two with it probably isn't worth the trouble.

Instead they suggested we add a copyright notice in-game (we don't seem to have one currently), because the GPL forbids redistributors from removing them (CC-BY-SA seems to have a similar requirement). This should make it easier for buyers to discover whether they've 'been had' so they can downrate the seller on eBay etc.

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Sounds good! "© 200?-2012 Wildfire Games - Download for free at wildfiregames.com" :D

That's what I would try too, lol :P But from what I gather, they can probably get away with removing the latter part so it would become just, say: "© 200?-2012 Wildfire Games - Buy cheap at ivanscheapgames.ru" ;) But still better than nothing, I suppose.

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That's what I would try too, lol :P But from what I gather, they can probably get away with removing the latter part so it would become just, say: "© 200?-2012 Wildfire Games - Buy cheap at ivanscheapgames.ru" ;) But still better than nothing, I suppose.

They could but they'd have to figure out which file to modify and then repackage it, judging by the quality of those eBay listings I think they would struggle with that :P They are probably limited to copy-pasting outdated info from our website and burning the EXE installer to a CD.

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Can't do DRM under the GPL anyway.

And we have no intention to stop people from selling the game in the first place. We do hope to find some ways to make it harder for people to cheat, but we do want them to copy the game as much as they want/can after all ;) Also, just to make something clear, it's my opinion (and I would dare say the official opinion of the team) that we should not, and will not, try to sell the game in any kind of way until we have a final release. After that point we could make it available for a small sum for people with slow internet/who wants a boxed copy/etc, but even if we'll sell something we don't want to sell unfinished software :)
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An idea for the "download for free @ wildfiregames.com" message is to hard code it into the game via obfuscation. Drop bits and pieces of the sucker EVERYWHERE in the release packages and have it executed at multiple points so that removal of the message would take more effort than your average buy-this-free-game ebay guy is willing to put into it. Then, the user can disable the message from the options menu or something. Just add "Click here to remove this message" directing to the option. Somewhat complex, but would make a good system, no?

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Can one comment on eBay products? If so... leave on saying those dudes have been ripped off.

@Erik, I know its OS and people can redistribute but I think we can all agree that scamming people (especially during alpha releases) is a bit too far. If you're going to scam them at least have some sense to do it when the game is complete...

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0 A.D. is currently under GPL v2 (or later) not v3 so someone could tivoize it. Time to move to GPL v3?

From the wiki article: "Unlike most GPL software, the kernel is licensed only under GPLv2 without the wording "or, at your option, any later version", therefore the agreement of all copyright holders would be required to relicense under a new version." As you state, this is not the case for 0 A.D.

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And we have no intention to stop people from selling the game in the first place. We do hope to find some ways to make it harder for people to cheat, but we do want them to copy the game as much as they want/can after all ;) Also, just to make something clear, it's my opinion (and I would dare say the official opinion of the team) that we should not, and will not, try to sell the game in any kind of way until we have a final release. After that point we could make it available for a small sum for people with slow internet/who wants a boxed copy/etc, but even if we'll sell something we don't want to sell unfinished software :)

The art of packaging can make people choose to purchase rather than downloading directly.

0 A.D. is actually already sell-able even before its completion because some people just want to have something new and don't need a finished version.

Edited by majapahit
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