Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Artwork & license issues

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

> The FSF don't like the CC, so they recommend the Free Art License
> instead .. but they don't like that one either, so we cross-license
> the art stuff.
That's exactly it.

> Sounds perfectly logical. Count me in!
OK, cool, thanks!

> What about the old stuff in the game? We could dual-license my old
> levels, but what about the rest?
Old stuff that has been arround for years, distributed in Debian,
Mandriva, Fedora, hosted on many ftp sites, does not worry me very much,
should there be a problem, it would have been revealed long time ago I
guess. The other aspect is: in case of a problem, the solution of
deleting the concerned item is acceptable for an old imported content.
It's a bit harder to decide to delete recent work that has been
specifically designed for LW6, it's just not honest to let *new* content
pour in the game if we already know it can raise license issues.

That was the reason for my mail, the next step I'll take is to describe
all this in the documentation, somewhere near the "how you can help"
section.

But as far as old LW5 content is concerned, my advice is: don't waste
time on it, time is precious. IMHO one can safely consider that if it's
in LW5, it's GPL'ed. In practice, I don't hold the whole copyright for
the game (LW5), for this I'd need a written (I mean, paper that gets wet
with water, yes, it still exists...) official transmission of the
copyright from every single contributor. So LW5 is in most GPL projects'
state: the project is GPL'ed and contributors are so scattered and
unreachable that it's impossible to ever change the license, and also
hard to enforce it in case of abuse.

LW6 is not in that state. Code is fresh and new, and when I import
content from LW5, I import content that comes from identified sources,
that is, in practice, people I'm still in touch with, for instance
because they read this list 8-) Still, the copyright of LW6 has not been
transmitted to the FSF. This is not mandatory for a GNU project and I
don't think it's necessary given the nature of this program (LW6).
Transmitting the copyright to the FSF would actually *require* *any*
contributor to write a paper in which he/she states that his/her
copyright is transmitted to the FSF, that his/her employer agree, and so
on. There I say: STOP!!! This is only a game.

> >   Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license
> >
> >
> >   This is a copyleft free license meant for artistic works and
> >   entertainment works. Please don't use it for software or documentation,
> >   since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.
> 
> 
> I guess the FSF really mean "source code" when they talk about
> "software". Who are vague now? :-P
That's a debate 8-)

I guess, however, that LW6 and games in general are not high priority
projects that require perfect and bullet proof legal protection. So it's
not really surprising if licenses do not cover these fields in detail.
Writing license is really the kind of boring task that gives you
headaches, I'm glad I'm not working in this field.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

PS: as a side note, LW6 might be translated into Polish some day 8-)

PPS: I'm personnally having trouble receiving mail from gnu.org, I had
to look at the archives to read the message I'm replying to. Wonder if
other members on the list have the same problem... Might be the
automatic SPAM detection of my email provider. Just checking.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden>     __/\__ ___
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