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

Quintus | Fri, 06 Feb 2015 11:25:00 UTC

Oh boys what is happening here. Are we really about to dissect the
entire thing just because we can’t get answers from two people?

So far, we only have “special” assets by Johan and Bugsbane. I am not
willing to give up only because we can’t get them to talk with us. If we
can get both to answer, the entire problem will be mere hot air.

For reference, here’s Bugsbane GitHub activity log:
https://github.com/Bugsbane?tab=activity

As you can see, he definitely _is_ active still. So it’s not that he
just has disappeared from the face of earth. We just need some way to
get his attention again at least for some few minutes. I’d be curious on
why he left, but that’s only a secondary problem. What we need from him
is the license confirmation. I really miss the PM functionality GitHub
removed two years ago or so...

It might also be that my email just wound up in his spam folder. I’ve
heard reports that this happens unusually often with my email, probably
because I host it all myself and do not make use of some big company
which I do not trust. So it might be of more use if someone using a
mainstream email provider makes the next try.

As far as Johan is concerned, we should then discuss what we should ask
him. Shall we request a confirmation of a CC-BY license? This is what
Luiji thinks of I guess. Or should we ask him for the right to
sublicense ourselves? Which would be what I favour as it would allow us
detailed control of who can do what with the title song (apart from
Johan himself, who can of course decide to give it to someone else
still).

I don’t want to get us into some indefinite stalling period just because
of this, even if it’s accompanied by some kind of “pre release”.

> I'm guessing the GNU license can't just be applied to the project at
> all, since this is not source code, forcing us into this exclusive
> license, correct? I figured it's worth double checking on this with
> you.

I’ve tried to explain this in an earlier email to you, but it’s a very
complicated topic. In my opinion, the game itself as a whole is not
copyrightable at all because it isn’t a joined work. It’s a compound
work (as per §9 of the German copyright law, http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_urhg.html#p0042
), i.e. a collection of individual works that are distributed together
to the benefit of the creators of the individual assets. The biggest of
those assets is the source code of the “tsc” executable, and that one
_is_ a joined work. All the graphics, music, etc. are works on its own
that can very well be distributed on their own without each other. As a
result, the licensing of the original SMC was like this:

1. The source code was GPLv3.
2. The assets were under the original SMC contribution license, which
   incorporated parts of or all of (the wording in unclear) the GPLv3.

Then we forked, accepting those licenses and thus binding us to obey
them with respect to the code and the existing assets. Thus, any asset
you base on an existing SMC asset (adaption) has to be GPLv3.

Then we made the grave mistake to allow people, including myself, to
commit stuff into the main tree without having a proper license
confirmation. This is the root cause of all of the trouble we are facing
now. I’m jumping back and forth to draw a license confirmation from the
circumstances, which is a recognised juridicial measure of determining
the contents of treaties that were not written down in some way. Luiji
is totally right in critising that as only an explicit confirmation can
give real safety.

Of course, the above is a) my personal interpretation and b) governed by
the German copyright law. I may be totally off and the game is to be
considered a joined work, which would force all the assets under the
GPLv3. To accomodate this possibility, I recently advised use of the
CC-BY license for contribution of assets as that license does not
conflict with the GPLv3 (CC-BY-SA does, because it contains its own
copyleft clause). Additionally, the Chinese copyright law might
automatically assign all rights to the Chinese government. You know, I
want to express that it’s impossible to cater for all the copyright laws
of all the countries in the world if you aren’t some huge corporation.

As a side note, if we wanted maximum safety, we have to request
contribution licensing agreements, CLAs. Canonical once started the
Harmony project to unify their texts; you can find templates on this
website: http://harmonyagreements.org/agreements.html
If you take the “selector” it will output a ready-to-use license
agreement. For the other files you have to handedit a bit to remove
those options that you don’t want.

I’m not advocating this. But having people agree on something before
their contribution is included is very close to this already, so we
might consider going that last step as well.

> We desperately need to run our own git management so that we can make
> sure anyone who pushes to git has selected a checkbox that licenses
> their work properly to the project.

Probably yes, see above. But not before the 2.0.0 release. Migrating all
the stuff away from GitHub would take quite some time.

Valete,
Quintus

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

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