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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Question About The License Change


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Hi Xenocide devs,

 

Being a linux user, I only follow this project from time to time, and since I do not have so much time to invest, I am only eagerly waiting for the Linux port to be done ;)

 

I recently noticed the license change announced on the main page, but to my surprise I cannot find any reference to it in the forums. I am mostly surprised, and indeed quite embarrassed: I am sorry to say, what I read in this announcement sounds like nonsense to me.

 

Project Xenocide has always been licenced under the GNU General Public Licence, which states that all work under this licence can no longer be used for other purposes by the original authors, as the copyrights have been transfered to the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

 

I can ensure you that this is absolutely not true. Having a project licensed under the GPL has nothing to do with transfering the copyright to the FSF. There are thousands of programs available under the GPL, for which the FSF absolutely holds no copyright. Most of the stuff I write myself is licensend under the GPL, and I still hold the copyright on what I wrote.

 

I can only suppose that this was confused with the requirement that contributors to some projects for which the FSF already holds the copyright also license their changes to the FSF, for reasons I do not wish to comment here. This is something I had to do once, for a patch of mine to be applied to GNU Emacs, and it involves signing (on paper) a declaration of copyright cession, and sending it via snail mail to the FSF - quite different from just licensing to others the code you still own.

 

As an illustration of the fact that you are still the owner of stuff you license under the GPL: there are also many firms who license pieces of software under the GPL, but offer to license the same pieces of software under different license to customers for which the GPL is not adapted. Widely known examples include the high-profile QT toolkit by TrollTech, and the cygwin environment which can be licensed by RedHat for commercial applications.

 

I encourage any of you to have a closer look at the text of the GPL for more details. You may be interrested in the final part, entitled "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", which advises to use in your licensing terms a line of the following form, which should leave no doubt as to the intended copyright owner :

 

Copyright © <year>  <name of author>

 

I hope this is only a miscomprehension of some sort.

 

As a sidenote, I am not a lawyer, but I am far from sure that a CC license adequately applies to computer programs, and I would have valued any references to this issue in the forums, to better understand what really lies behind that decision.

 

Best regards,

--

Yann.

Edited by ydirson
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I recently noticed the license change announced on the main page, but to my surprise I cannot find any reference to it in the forums. I am mostly surprised, and indeed quite embarrassed: I am sorry to say, what I read in this announcement sounds like nonsense to me.

This has indeed been discussed, a lot.

I'll let the others answer the questions regarding the licence, as I absolutely hate the whole subject (as many of us do).

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This has indeed been discussed, a lot.

 

Thanks much for the link. It is quite a pity, but it seems the thread has been locked, so I'll add only a few comments here:

 

- the suggestion of using different licences for code and content seems very reasonable. Indeed many project to that already - UFO:AI and Planeshift are the first ones which come to my mind.

 

The GPL is not 100% adapted to content, that's granted. But is that a reason to change the license for the code ? Will it really serve any purpose to change that one ? I can see reasons for people to wish licensing their content under a different license (although other games, like Battle for Wesnoth show that it is possible to build a game 100% GPL, including content), but from what I read in that discussion, for the code only disavantages have been mentionned as a consequence for the license change.

 

- the announcement on the 1st page still contains some information that is completely false, despite several people pointing that out.

 

- that discussion appears after the decision has been made, so I guess it would be difficult to convince the dev team to do otherwise.

 

I'll let the others answer the questions regarding the licence, as I absolutely hate the whole subject (as many of us do).

 

Well, licensing issues are not an easy thing. But there are people out there with more understanding on these issues than all of us, who could be willing to help. There are people at the FSF who can explain precisely what the GPL means; there are people on the debian-legal list who could also explain the consequences of selecting one license or another.

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Here is a couple of other things I thought about since yesterday:

 

- how many persons did contribute to the code, and to the data, till now ? And did all of them agree to the change ? Even former contributors which are not around any more ? I suppose so, or you would not have been able to do the change, but then you surely know how much work it is to gather the answers from all those people holding copyright on the project.

 

- someone mentionned that the non-commercial clause will make it impossible to put this game on a CDROM and sell the CDROM. You may not care today. But what if one day it looks like a good idea ? It won't be possible any more, except if you go and ask again all of the former contributers. And if one of them does not answer, you would have to remove or rewrite from scratch all of his contributions before being able to do so.

 

- what is the need that triggered the addition of the "non-commercial" clause ? I suppose that content authors may not want their work reused in commercial games. But how would they feel about their work being reused in other free-software games (eg. ufo2000, which was mentionned already) ? Such sharing of the data could even work both ways: if a project reuses contents from xenocide, it is likely that it will also produce some compatible contents(in style, and license) , that xenocide could reuse in return. Allowing this, while preventing purely-commercial projects to profit from your work without giving anything back, is probably something that can be achieved, possibly by licensing the contents with the GPL plus an additionnal clause that would not be unlike the one that prevents reusing a GPL library in a non-GPL-compatible program. But again I am not a lawyer, and this would require some discussion with people who can express such a clause in the right way, and see the consequences of it.

 

Best regards,

--

Yann.

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I missed the discussion. :(

 

Being a fellow ufo2000 member...all I can/will say is that I am disappointed in the license change. (not here to make an argument...so I am not going to post in this thread anymore than this)

 

Nonetheless, good luck with project Xenocide. :)

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