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

Luiji Maryo | Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:35:06 UTC

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