License Issues
General
I started this page so we can discuss specific license-related topics and issues. Licensing may not be of interest to a lot of the people playing UFO:AI, but it has great impact on the development, distribution and last but not least the "free"dom of the game.
We have a short summary of licenses we plan to use for all code & content of UFO:AI with is located on the License page.
Every code or content that is licensed under a fully compatible license as the ones listed on the License page should not be a problem to use in UFO:AI.
Everything else needs to be confirmed/checked.
If you find any code or content that you believe is not covered by a supported license (or has no hint where it comes from) please speak up.
Personal note: I (Hoehrer) am aiming for the game to be distributable in the main repository of the Debian Linux distribution. Not because I want to have it as a package for my distribution (which is a nice side effect btw :)), but because they have quite strict rules when it comes to licenses. If we can get it in there we can get it into virtually any other distribution as well.
Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License
@mattn: Actually I think the ambient bird sound (sound/ambience/bird01.wav, acquired from here) 'may' be a problem in terms of usage, but I'm not sureabout that.
- 'fixed' in r14177 --Mattn 19:56, 23 January 2008 (CET)
To quote the license (Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License) it uses: You are free: To perform, display, and distribute copies of this whole work for noncommercial purposes (e.g., file-sharing or noncommercial webcasting).
This is in contrast to version of the GPL (or non-restrictive CC) license we use (commercial use is allowed as long as the rest of the terms is met as well) and I don't know if this might prevent UFO:AI to be incorporated in several distributions.
On the other hand we have the part where it says: You are free: To sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform this work for commercial or noncommercial purposes.
As much as I'd like to add these things I also don't want to have UFO:AI not in the main repositories of several of the free Linux distributions. This would be a big disadvantage in terms of our own distribution of the game.
Is there anybody who can tell us how the these licenses would influence the distribution of UFO:AI?
The question above aside ... we need to at least credit the artist(s) by name (not just a link to the place where we found it in the svn logs) if we include this sound as to the "Under the following conditions:" part of the used license here. This will spare us the searching afterwards if e.g. the page suddenly vanishes etc... Not to speak of the "For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work." part, so the license used for the file needs to be made clear as well.
--Hoehrer 10:28, 13 February 2007 (CET)
To summarize my own thoughts on this ... the license allows us to include sound samples (or generally content) under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License as long as we "creatively transform" it (what would this mean for the sounds we include?) for use in UFO:AI and credit the author correctly. I may be wrong since I'm far from being an expert in this field.
--Hoehrer 11:56, 13 February 2007 (CET)
Quoted from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/legalcode (the full legal text of the license)
...
a. Re-creativity permitted. You may create and reproduce Derivative Works, provided that:
1.
the Derivative Work(s) constitute a good-faith partial or recombined usage employing "sampling," "collage," "mash-up," or other comparable artistic technique, whether now known or hereafter devised, that is highly transformative of the original, as appropriate to the medium, genre, and market niche; and
2.
Your Derivative Work(s) must only make a partial use of the original Work, or if You choose to use the original Work as a whole, You must either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative Work(s) or transform it into something substantially different from the original Work. In the case of a musical Work and/or audio recording, the mere synchronization ("synching") of the Work with a moving image shall not be considered a transformation of the Work into something substantially different.
...
If we really use the sound 1:1 as provided by the creator I think the only thing we can build upon is the "You must either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative..." part of the license.The UFO:AI background sounds (all of them together being the derivative work ... but it is pretty far-fetched.
--Hoehrer 12:19, 13 February 2007 (CET)
CC Noncommercial
Does anybody know how a "noncommercial" Creative Commons license relates to e.g. the license guidelines of the Debian distribution. i.e. can stuff with that license be shipped with Debian? --Hoehrer 13:54, 24 July 2007 (CEST)
- It can not. To quote: The maintainers of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the license's anti-DRM provisions and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.[6] As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licences, so they can be compatible with the DFSG.[7] As of July 2007, it remains to be seen if version 3 of the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses will be approved by Debian.
- see also cc version3 to cover debian people claims
- personaly i do not think that we should care about debian in such case :-P--Zenerka 15:11, 24 July 2007 (CEST)