Re: [tsc-devel] Signing-off commits on legal questions

Luiji Maryo | Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:36:23 UTC

Addendum: we *could* include these images in the game, since the obvious
intent is there, but I don't believe we could put them under a free and
open source license.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Luiji Maryo <…i@u…>
wrote:

> My problem boils down to this: it's obvious that Bugsbane intended for
> these images to be included into the game. It's non-obvious that he
> intended for the images to be under such a permissive license that would
> permit it's modification and reuse in other products freely, or which one
> of the many licenses that do this it would be particularly under.
>
> As much as I would like to include the graphics, I don't believe any of us
> have the legal ability to assume what license Bugsbane releases it under,
> and any attempts to make such an assertation would be futile unless we can
> find a court president that says we can make such an assertion.
>
> Essentially, we shouldn't include these graphics unless we contact
> Bugsbane or a lawyer.
>
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 4:33 AM, Quintus <…s@q…> wrote:
>
>> Luiji Maryo <…i@u…> writes:
>> > I have the general fear that including any component without a strict
>> > license release from the author is extremely dangerous. This is
>> > *especially* problematic when we are releasing the components under such
>> > unrestrictive licenses, essentially giving people perpetual distribution
>> > and modification rights to a component.
>>
>> The procedure I outlined should only ever be an exception. The graphics
>> Bugsbane created were clearly targetted at inclusion into the game; I’m
>> pretty sure that he’s not going to object if we use it for exactly
>> that. Maybe I should make the exceptional character of this more clear
>> in the document. If I wouldn’t be very certain that he wanted to have it
>> in the game, I would not have accepted datahead’s suggestion of
>> inclusion. And we really need the SVGs.
>>
>> If I understand you correctly, you would not have included the graphics
>> then? This would effectively mean that we have to remove the berries,
>> etc. as their SVGs have never been officially contributed, but only the
>> ready PNGs were. This is a result I wanted to avoid by all means (also
>> because the berry PNGs itself are licensed just fine).
>>
>> > Even if we were legally safe, I
>> > worry there's a moral problem to be had in the case we ever, through
>> > miscommunication, encounter this situation with someone who didn't
>> > understand the nature of the licensing their work would have to be
>> under to
>> > be included in the project.
>>
>> As explained, it should be an absolute exception, meant for cases where
>> the author disappears. If the author does not disappear, there is no
>> need to go through such a procedure, and it should never been done.
>>
>> As I stated in the document:
>>
>> > It’s not a way to get any weirdly licensed code into the project
>> > codebase; the maintainer doing the signoff still has to check the
>> > legal circumstances and may well reject the contribution if he isn’t
>> > certain about permission.
>>
>> Which is also why I wanted to ensure that the person doing the signoff
>> is someone knowledgable like you or me.
>>
>> > The copyrights and licensing around the original SMC codebase seem
>> > ambiguous enough. I fear making this worse.
>>
>> Which is true. By all means we should avoid screwing up the licensing
>> issues we already have even more. Still the problem remains what to do
>> with Bugsbane’s awesome graphics.
>>
>> Valete,
>> Quintus
>>
>> --
>> Blog: http://www.quintilianus.eu
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> When Linus Torvalds dies, Linux is going to be forked.
>



-- 
When Linus Torvalds dies, Linux is going to be forked.