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

Chris Jacobsen | Mon, 02 Feb 2015 17:54:33 UTC

I would have assumed Bugsbane's graphics fall under the old, default SMC license, but I may have been making the mistake of applying the forum rules for secretmaryo.org when these were submitted through github.
Quintus - do you think maybe these graphics need to be moved to an exclusive license (and by extension the derivative stone graphics)?
It does serve as a challenge to us.  We should not push graphics changes to github if they do not have SVG's.  We need to ask the author for the SVG's immediately.  Ultimately, though, there are lots of standards, and mistakes like this happen.  It's just something for us to watch out for in the future.
-datahead
 

     On Monday, February 2, 2015 11:36 AM, Luiji Maryo <…i@u…> wrote:
   

 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

I will reject HTML emails.     | Ich akzeptiere keine HTML-Nachrichten.
                               |
Use GnuPG for mail encryption: | GnuPG für Mail-Verschlüsselung:
http://www.gnupg.org           | http://gnupg.org/index.de.html





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



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