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

Quintus | Wed, 04 Feb 2015 10:13:27 UTC

> For my understanding, what problem does this cause for distributors?  I
> don't doubt you are correct; I just want to understand the
> implications.

Packaging the game is, you guess it, an adaption of the works included
in the game, i.e. of the code and of the graphics. Our “special” license
tag does not allow for adaptions, so the distributor can’t distribute
any assets licensed as “special”. Solution to this would be to expand
the meaning of the “special” license tag to allow distributors to do
this (which is exactly what we want). The problem we face is that we
can’t -- because we do not have the right to sublicense those assets. If
an author says the asset is not meant to be used by anyone else than us,
this excludes distributors. That’s a major problem. And this is why I
either want to minimize use of ths “special” license or get permission
from the authors to license the asset the way we deem it useful (→ right
to sublicense).

I have emailed Bugsbane (again) and asked him to clarify on the
licensing of the SVGs he created.

We should probably do something similar with regard to the title theme
song, but Johan’s latest idea of paying him might get us yet another
problem there.

One further note on that, datahead, because I remember you having asked
for that some time: Not each license is a viral license. If you have
something under CC-BY, you don’t have to license your adaption of it
under CC-BY as well. You can use any proprietary license you want, as
long as you name the original author. As I explained earlier, you need
permission from the author to adapt his work. But if you have the
permission, you can license your adaption under any license you want,
unless the author made his permission dependant on you obeying some
conditions (such as licensing your adaption under a specific license,
which is known as the “viral effect”).

>> I would have viewed it as a technical legal matter.  The title theme of
>> the game probably really should be changed if someone forks the game.
>>
> This is essentially the problem we're facing. The graphics can, with little
> doubt, be included in our game, and we may release the game with them.
> However, the game data cannot be considered fully Free and Open Source
> until we get all "special" licensed files clarified under real FLOSS
> licenses.

You are absolutely right on this, Luiji. Now just dig Bugsbane up again
so that he can clarify. We need a practical solution until he comes into
reach again, and the practical solution I suggested was that I take the
responsibility of a possible copyright infringement; I wouldn’t do that
if I wasn’t reasonably sure that what we’re doing is OK. The problem
with the game not being “forkable” persists with that solution,
though. Basically, we are in a situation similar to those numerous large
games by known publishers that licensed the code under GPL and did not
include the graphics, because they hadn’t the permission to do so (or
didn’t want to).

Another solution would be to strip all “special”-licensed assets right
now until we have a licensing confirmation. This would mean:

1. Removing all of Bugsbane’s SVGs
2. Removing the title and credit song by Johan
3. Removing all of the mushroom replacements, because we don’t have the
   SVGs which is against the policy.

To prevent 2) we’d need the permission to sublicense the songs from
Johan. I agree with datahead in the regard that if someone forks the
game, he should swap out the title song because it is so much of an
identity for the game. On the other hand we don’t want to get the
distributors into trouble. This requires a fine-grained license that
only applies to the title song, which can only be done if we have the
right to sublicense.

>> We may run into a situation where someone makes a case that something
>> has no need for layers in Inkscape and that a PNG "is good enough" In
>> this instance we could just ask them to dump the PNG file into
>> Inkscape and make a simple SVG, though.

You can’t “dump a PNG into an SVG”. Then you could just use the PNG
as-is. The Vectorize function of Inkscape is something that really
doesn’t work well.

> Quintus: I have a nasty habit of using the GMail web client when I'm not
> encrypting/singing messages (because GMail works horribly with IMAP
> clients). Reply goes directly to the last sender and Reply All goes to
> both. It looks like I'll have to manually set the To: line. :/

Quite a lot of people use GMail for posting to mailing lists (I can tell
that from monitoring the traffic on the Ruby-Talk ML). I can’t imagine
that there’s no option to get this correct automatically.

Vale,
Quintus

-- 
Blog: http://www.quintilianus.eu

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