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

Quintus | Mon, 02 Feb 2015 09:33:15 UTC

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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