Licensing, the Future, and Tablets

[eleazzaar]

I'm not simply trying to stir up trouble, but here's a question that will be much easier to deal with now, rather than a few years down the road.

It looks like for the foreseeable future, tablets and phones are going to make up an increasingly large percentage of the "computing devices" that people use. Whatever your OS or hardware preferences, one reasonably probable future is one in which less GPL-friendly App stores are the gatekeeper to a majority of tablets. Regular old computers, weather running *nix, Windows, or Os X, will probably become something of a niche.

If you want Terasology to be playable on iOS, or whatever else exists down, A GPL license alone probably doesn't cover that (though there are more than one informed opinions on that point). Personally, my motivation for making FOSS games is not to support a particular licensing scheme, but so that people can enjoy cool stuff that i helped make. Other people's motivations may differ, and i don't think anybody has grounds to criticize someone else for having a different motivation.

The thing about licenses, is the creator of code, art, whatever can release his work under multiple licenses, and allow use under any one of them.

So, the most above-board, and legally unquestionable thing to do (if you want to do something like this) would be to write up a contributors agreement that says something like, "I hereby release my contributions to Teresology under the GPL and license X. It may be included in an app store as long as it is free." (insert actual legalese here.) To contribute, newcomers would need to "sign" the contributors agreement.

The point of this is, that while it may be a little difficult to get the current batch of contributors to agree to additional distribution licenses, it will be practically impossible down a year or two down the road when various contributors have come and gone. That's the situation Wesnoth found itself in a while ago. Better to plan ahead.

 

[Cervator]

A very valid topic, not bad at all to discuss

We're still running with what Begla put on the code in the very beginning. I've kept it in the back of my mind that at some point (start of Alpha maybe?) we should review the license setup, possibly transfer it to an officially set up MovingBlocks organization (that's Begla's org, anyway), then consider our licensing options more closely, with this exact thing in mind. Then apply it properly to all the files, a fair few have gone header-less at this point.

Holding me back is an unfamiliarity with the licenses out there, a desire to see us get a solid start - and of course also simply preferring to spend my limited time on immediately productive stuff

Spout has a more exact license setup, but then they've also been going for a fair bit longer. They request a sort of sign-off per pull request to GitHub, which seems to make sense, even if it might seem a little obstacle-y - might be too much? A sign-up agreement sounds preferable, tho I suspect we'd see an occasional random pull request where trying to get an agreement first would go nowhere.

 

[eleazzaar]

I don't know if you can transfer ownership of other people's contributions to an organization-- at least not without their consent. Of course you can always rip out the contributions of whoever objects-- but that can be destructive, especially for code.

To minimize the possibility of problems, you probably should have at least a statement of your intent-- even if you don't quite know what license accomplishes it best. That way at least they won't be surprised.

I'm not sure if the Apache license is supposed cover art/music/sound assets.
A lot of open project use one of the Creative Commons licenses, for these. Their claim to fame is very easy to understand terms.

At other projects i've worked, new contributors are always asked, "do you release whatever under license X?", and their stuff isn't committed until and unless they agree.

And, the disclaimer: i'm not remotely a lawyer.

 

[Immortius]

I think this is worth setting something up in this space. And we do need to be careful with what we use and how.

My understanding is the Terasology codebase is under the Apache 2.0 license, and that was the intent under which I have been contributing. I also suspect Apache doesn't cover non-code assets, so we should look into some for that space.

The libraries we use are under a mixture of licenses - Apache 2.0, New BSD, LGPL and ZLIB. These licenses carry various obligations we must follow when redistributing them, and we should attend to this. Often a license statement or notice must be included.

LGPL specifically requires us to keep the library in a separate jar (or adapt an LGPL compatible license), which is part of the reason I changed the build process to not combine jars.

What we should probably consider is how we want the code used in the wild. Is it fine if someone takes the code, rebrands it and sells it? Do we explicitly want to prevent commercial use of that sort? Do we want to dual license, with a non-redistributable commercial license option we can provide when we desire? And who is "we", anyway.

 

[eleazzaar]

And who is "we", anyway.

Not me. (even if i'd been around long enough that many of my ideas were implemented). Game mechanic ideas don't seem to have any legal protections. You just have to worry about the agreement of those who have contributed actual bits. Or failing that those whose contributions would be too much of a pain to replace.