Spring RTS Engine

This is the first giant, bloglike post I've made in ages. Probably the last one, too, but meh, I did not find a short way to say all of this, there was just too much territory to cover this time. I've edited it to keep from repeating myself too frequently, I hope.

I think this marks the first time we're going to have a license war that has nothing to do with a release. I figured that I might as well just do it now, instead of keeping everybody in suspense about my intentions here.



[GIANT BOMBSHELL MODE, ON]

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1. Central Argument

Well, let's start with a simple statement of my philosophical position on this:

"Spring is either the most ambitious and fully-realized Open Source game engine on the Internet, and the vast majority of players don't realize it, because they're playing a game that's a technological dinosaur... or Spring is already dead, and the release of the next round of projects is going to prove that we can no longer expect this project to ever reach its real potential, and everybody with serious talent involved should go elsewhere, or go pro and quit chasing after a dream that's not realizable by our collective genius."

That's the real issue, stripped down to essentials. And I don't even wanna hear, nor do I care, about the "we're just doing this for fun" crowd, because half of you would be lying, and share the dream of Spring flowing into something amazing... and the other half aren't the primary drivers here, intellectually. Nor do I want to hear Smoth re-iterate his position, which is singular, that he's trying to realize a very particular idea here. We know, Smoth, and it's not incompatible with an engine that generates massive excitement and where you get played, too.

2. How can this goal be realized?

Well, primarily, by changing Spring's image and supporting the indie games to the hilt. I'm not going to re-visit the overall, project-level issues- advertisement, Lobby support, a better website. I fought that fight a couple of months ago, hoping that in time (and, hopefully by P.U.R.E.'s official release) things will have changed- if not entirely, then enough to make stuff start to slide in the right direction. I'm not too worried about it, we've made some strides in good ways, I think that, if a few people focus their attention for a bit, it'll happen.

On the game-designer side... I have come to the conclusion that the best way to facilitate this is to not provide any more technological life-support for the OTA mods.

CA's team can and will probably support them forever. I don't expect any of the following arguments to move them, although I'm about to do my best to convince them that they should take a serious look at their policies.

In my case, I'm simply not going to allow my work to be used by any games still using any content from OTA. Period. I'm still researching how to write the license, but basically:

A. Everybody who is not using OTA content may use my Lua work from P.U.R.E. Yes, that includes E&E, and other projects run by or including people I don't like much personally. This is a lot bigger than our mutual issues, frankly, and I'm not doing this in some weird attempt to make you like me or whatever.

B. Everybody who is legally able to use my work can do so, without most restrictions or hassles. No issues with including the license, no credit requirements, etc.

C. The only real requirement is that you may not re-license my work, so that it cannot be given away to OTA mods.

So... it will not be PD. I think that's fail, here. Most of it could be converted and used by BA and CA very easily, and I do not want that to happen.

It will be restricted, in favor of the indie games. All of you. I really hope this is clear. It's not the GPL, there will be no copyleft provisions, and you can even keep the sourcecode private, and I will not be able to yank it from projects that are legally using it, throw hissy-fits, etc. That will be reserved for OTA mods that have violated the license.


3. CA is mis-applying the GPL...
...and demonstrates why we should not use the GPL
as the primary license format for games built with Spring.

CA's team are very nice people. They want to share their code, and they want to be able to use improvements on their shared code, etc., etc.

This is nice. They're wonderful people, for doing this. And I owe them all a great debt, for their occasional help.

The problem is, how they went about this isn't actually legal, in my opinion. Please don't hate me, but here's why.

Some of CA's Lua code isn't really protected by the GPL, in my opinion, after reading the law on this stuff. Not because the original authors didn't potentially have copyright, but because of the way that the code was applied to the project. Please understand that this argument is detailed much further later on.

IOW, if Trepan / jK / Aegis / etc. wrote it and distro'd it as a Widget / Gadget then it was put into CA later, it's protected code (albeit, used in an illegal fashion, as it broke the GPL). If it's derivative of that code, it's probably still protected- I can't go, "whee, Trepan's source is free", because that's bullshit, he wrote and distributed the core Lua gameplay stuff to multiple parties, ages and ages ago, and it was totally legal.

If it's original, and showed up first in CA's SVN, it's almost certainly not.



I know the above statements will be met with flaming, mainly from all of the people who would like to pretend that CA is somehow a legal project, because it wants to be. Someday.

It's not, and there is where their licensing stuff unravels.

I read US copyright laws, through the Berne and WIPO Treaties and the EU's equivalent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, after our last license wars, and here were my final conclusions:

A. US copyright laws apply, in your countries of residence, if you are violating a US copyright. I.E., it is a given that OTA's content is not yours to legally use, until that is determined in a court of law. Under US law, copyright is assumed until successfully challenged, therefore, all of the OTA mods are illegal and in violation of copyright.

We all know this, we all admit this, but it has deeper implications, legally. I wanted to restate this, however, because the rest of the arguments follow from this.

B. Under US law, CA is what is known as a "derivative work". Basically, you're building on top of a copyrighted work. Submitting work via SVN is, pretty clearly, adding to a derivative work, too.

It's not auto-protected by the GPL by the coder, then somehow, when the very same coder uploads it via SVN and publishes it in a version of CA, that same coder is using it to build a derivative work with it, and the GPL protection stays in place.

That's a totally absurd argument. CA's coders cannot slap the GPL on stuff and stick it into CA, that's not a reasonable interpretation of how the GPL works.

If the code came from, say, Spring's base files... was downloaded from a website, where the author who wrote it wasn't a game designer of CA, etc., nor in communication with said team, etc., it would still be protected.

But that's not what's happening. So, if you want to flame about this... I'd suggest that instead of attacking me for revealing the naked Emperor, or trying to defend the absurd, that you guys have a constructive conversation about how to get his clothes back on.

Personally, I think the CA guys should just close the project down as an unwieldy, massive mess, and make a really good game with original content and kickass Lua. Other than art team problems, you guys have all of the relevant skillsets, and if you did so, I am pretty certain you could find artists, because your code would kick ass, and you would no longer be a "mod", but a "game", which is an important distinction.

At any rate, under US law, and supported by numerous precedents... "derivative works" are not entitled to any copyright protection. None. You're putting work into public domain.

C. And since the CA team all live in countries which are signatories to the various treaties about this stuff, they're expected to respect US copyright law, including this wrinkle (this is not at all like the Pirate's Cove, guys- even in Sweden, you're probably breaking the law here, because you aren't "providing reference materials", you're making content available that you do not own).

D. Therefore, since CA's team cannot receive copyright protection under US law, they are not able to copyright the additional features of their derivative work.

Result: anything that was released directly into CA, or was put into CA by the authors, or by the team, which just happens to include the same people who wrote it... cannot have the GPL applied. And the stuff that is GPL... is being used in violation of the license.




Now... I assume the above will get everybody hot and bothered.

I suggest reading the Wikipedia summaries of US copyright law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the EU Copyright Directive, and the WIPO and Berne Treaties. You will find that, once you pare down a bit, that basically, we're all supposed to respect each other's copyright laws. The USA has really strict copyright laws, stricter than almost anywhere else. And OTA was made here. It's that simple. Everything else comes from the fact, freely admitted by all reasonable parties around here, that OTA mods are violating copyright. I think the only surprising bit is that nobody seemed to understand the full implications of that.




So, basically, I'm not interested in arguments that "CA is giving it all away to everybody, you should too".

First off, because their intention wasn't to "give it all away to everybody", because the GPL copyleft provisions would, if they were ever applied, mean that the original owner of the work would find it was all, well, GPL'd. Which nobody making an original-content game wants.

Second off, because I completely disagree that that's the best thing I can do with what I've made, and I've already explained why.

Thirdly, their project is ample demonstration of the legal perils involved with such a restrictive copyleft license. They'd have been far better off to just license it all CC-PD and be done with it, frankly.

4. Why do you hate OTA? Etc., etc.

Guess what... I don't. I loved OTA, back in the day. I wouldn't be here, if it hadn't existed. What little code I've contributed to this engine is long-gone, but I've always been a huge supporter of this project, ever since I saw the SWTA video, and knew that SJ was making something amazing and special.

That said...

BA != OTA. CA != OTA. The closest thing is Pxtl's project, in Spring, and so far as I can tell, it's not getting played. So, don't tell me about hating OTA.

And I know that many people, and in fact a lot of very nice, honest and hardworking people, are working on various OTA mods (I've helped LordLemmi with stuff before, answered many questions from OTA mod guys, etc.), and will probably feel offended because I want to exclude them from my help in this very important area.

Personally, that's the hardest part for me. And I will happily continue to help, in other areas that are older parts of Spring. But you need to learn Lua yourselves, or take stuff from CA or other folks.

I just don't think that picking and choosing would help the project- even if I wrote some miraculously-cool Lua that was a must-have item, and could destroy the playerbase of any one game... I'd just be re-creating BA or whoever I denied it to, and the cycle would be the same. I'm not doing that, that would be wrong.

I will just let you guys find a way to do it without my help, and I will encourage anybody who will listen to go my way on this. I don't really expect any takers, but who knows, maybe this will change things.

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[GIANT BOMBSHELL MODE, OFF]

If you have a specific question about something I've said, I will address that in PM, provided it's not just a flame or whatever, but I will not be replying here, nor am I interested in responding to any particular argument raised.

Nor am I interested in really reading the responses, which I will go ahead and predict:

1. Idiots trying to poke holes in the arguments by finding bad sentence structure or other problems that came about by me writing and editing this for the last 4 hours, after a very long day that involved a lot of serious outdoor work and other stuff.

2. People who hate me for various reasons, or just like these things to be massive drama-fests about personality, who will not really bother reading it and then will go off about how awful I am.

3. OTA modders who will be massively disappointed in me for not just keeping them fed with technology they can't make themselves, because this goddamn engine has gotten so complex and demands so much time to do anything now. Of all of the people involved in this post, I have the most sympathy for you, frankly.

4. Thoughtful people who will realize that I would not have written this at all, at such massive length, if I didn't think that it was time we had a final debate about this, and set priorities accordingly.

Meh, basically, I wrote this not to hate on anybody. I want to make sure that I never have to see a license issue with my code again, and it's crystal clear what I want, who gets it, and why.

Seriously, before anybody says I'm hating on CA (since that's the only spot where I feel I've dragged anybody else into this)...

I'm not, dammit.

What I am saying is that the various statements that their people have made about the GPL and how it applies to them are based on a bad reading of the law, and I'm attempting to correct their facts. If, like KDR, they used CC-PD, I probably would have not even mentioned them, but as they've seen fit to bring this up elsewhere, I am trying to present everybody with the legal picture as I think it really applies.

And I personally praise them for providing so much code to the community, regardless of the specific license.

That's all, I'm REALLY DONE NOW, it's 3AM and I need to sleep so bad, my head is falling off. Please resist the urge to turn this into a flame-war, it's totally not going to change my personal policy about this, and the CA stuff if mainly FYI for them, and for people in dread of using their work, and honestly, I think that is a whole separate discussion thread, because it'll otherwise get mixed up with various stupid Argh-hater stuff that we've all read before anyhow... but that's just me.

tl;dr: Argh is selling the models in PURE on Turbosquid and making them PD or GPL would allow anyone to use them without paying.

<laughs>

You mean the stuff I put up, back at the beginning, when I was briefly unemployed? Meh, go look at it, people, it's no giant secret or whatever, and I'm certainly not ashamed of it.

It's all stuff by me, of course, I would never have tried to profit by GMN or Keithus, of course.

TBH, I'd forgotten about it. Nor did it earn me a dime, it was a good way to keep busy while I interviewed various places, though.

At any rate, that's not why the content is not getting released.

[FINAL EDIT] Shoot, you did get me to respond. Meh, that was just strange, though, you brought that up ages ago in my main release thread, and tbh, I don't think anybody cares.

If anybody on my team is actually worried about my non-existent profits, meh, PM me I'll happily both show a record from TurboSquid, or give my username / pass to either of you, to verify that what I've said is totally true, etc. One look at the stuff there should convince you, though, I didn't exactly price it to sell, I was actually hoping, in some vague way, that I could find freelance work or something, but I got another job instead.[/ FINAL EDIT]

(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.

(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.

To my non-lawyer mind that bolded part would specifically exclude new material like the lua code in CA from being derivative as it is not the part that contains the unlawfully used material. However, without knowledge of the case law and proper legal training it is impossible to determine the actual meaning of the law and you will need to talk to a lawyer before asserting anything about the legal status of any non-cavedog material within CA or any other mod. Just because you can find a case that seems similar does not mean it applies as there may be legal distinctions you are not aware of.

Also AFAIK a derivative work must contain creative components of the original work in order to be derivative (e.g. the holding frame of a previous work is not a creative component), if this tie is severed it does not matter how the work was created (e.g. if you apply a thick clay layer over a sculpture and then sculpt your own you have technically taken the sculpture but none of its surfaces remain in your work).

You define the entire content of the SVN as one work, IMO an SVN is just a storage method and about as much of a work as your harddrive. Only by compiling the material contained into a single archive do you form a work. As such, committing a file to an SVN does not automatically make it a derivative of any material within the SVN which would destroy your hypothesis that any file, regardless of its content, is automatically a derivative if it is uploaded to an SVN containing other works.

Also, as you said, only a court can find a copyright invalid and as such, until a court decides that all of CA's material must be made public domain you have no claim to it, no matter what you think the law says.

BTW, at some point the Spring SVN has contained OTA material.

In closing, ask a lawyer.

Meh. After this, I'm really, really going to sleep, and not answering any more stuff.

Basically, I think it's your grasp of English that's at fault here- lawyerese is very hard to read:

protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists

Means, in non-lawyerese, "if you are building a derivative work, involving stuff you can't claim copyright to".

does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully

Means, "you may not apply for copyright protection for anything in that derivative work, including your own stuff".

BTW, at some point the Spring SVN has contained OTA material.

Which is why we all sighed in relief, when it was all finally removed to separate files. The day CA has completely original content, has changed all the names of their units, etc., is the day they're probably legal. That day is not now, nor is it a legal project right now. I'm not planning to challenge their copyrights, or distribute their files as if the GPL wasn't in force. I am saying, though, that I do not think their approach is legal or would survive scrutiny.

Oh boy. Maybe it's not such a bad thing that I'm going out of town in a couple days :p

Try not to burn the castle down before I get back...

On a more serious note, I'm one of the CA devs, but I'm not one of the huge proponents of the whole GPL thing (in fact, I'm quite ignorant about the whole licensing thing and the intricacies of copyright law). This promises to be an enlightening, if likely heated, discussion. Unfortunately it is not one I feel capable of contributing meaningfully to, so I will content myself for now with watching from the sidelines.

You are completely wrong (pun intended, sorry Maddox).

Just because CA depends on otacontent.sdz or even if it includes copyright infringing material itself, this does not automatically make original CA work non-GPL. You have a gross misunderstanding what derivative work means and how it applies to code. Is CA, as a whole, GPL? No, it's not. Nobody claims it is. Does Microsoft Windows become GPL if it is found to include code from the Linux kernel? No, of course not. It would be liable for damages and have to remove the code.

Argh wrote:

does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully

Means, "you may not apply for copyright protection for anything in that derivative work, including your own stuff".

I think that depends on how you prioritize the words. Does "in which" refer to the part or the work? I think it applies to the part (otherwise it would have read "any work or part thereof") as having a rule which defaults to throwing everything into the Public Domain is dangerous and does not allow rectifying infringement (as once a work hits the public domain it cannot be put under copyright again), if anyone were to find one infringing line of code in e.g. Windows the entirety of Windows (minus the infringing line) would be public domain and even getting a license or removing the line could not remove it from that again. This site suggests that a deadlock can appear which would be impossible if all changes were public domain:

Without [authorization from the copyright holder of the original work to create and prepare the revisions that became the derivative work], the creator of the derivative work cannot use any part of the underlying work without the permission of the copyright proprietor in that underlying work nor can the copyright proprietor of the underlying work use any part of the derivative work. A stalemate results.

if anyone were to find one infringing line of code in e.g. Windows the entirety of Windows (minus the infringing line) would be public domain and even getting a license or removing the line could not remove it from that again.

No, as Det said, it'd come down to money, in the real world.

Look, people, an absolute ruling, i.e., "we hereby declare your copyrights null and void" is rare, IRL, because, well, people screw up. They:

A. Use patented algorithms they don't have a right to actually use.

B. Grab some code from somewhere, get it working, but forget to obfuscate where it came from.

C. Borrow some code for a demo, etc., then forget about it, but it's still in the codebase, etc.

That's why, in cases involving code, it's almost aways adjudicated to damages. Otherwise you'd have company after company totally destroyed, when in fact in the end, it's mainly about payoffs. Meh, the entire point of the GPL, in the first place, was to give coders writing novel stuff a way to keep it from being buried under patents, which is always the biggest issue.

At any rate, KDR, I'll take a look and see about finding some case law cites that would apply. But, basically, I'm not declaring some absolutist thing here, I'm mainly pointing out that they're in very shaky territory. Meh, personally, I expect the end result will be nothing changes, tbh, but I have gotten several PMs about this, and Smoth's post about it got me thinking we all need to explore this, and those are my conclusions.

I'm interested in a clear example of what you see happening with CA, just the facts

----
---My opinion on X% of open source games in general:
I find that that the licensing on content is half assed, poorly documented, mixed in with content from people who don't care and don't understand intellectual property

----
---My extreme opinion of how the universe should be:

You need a database that documents sources of content fully, so that the purity of the content can be easily verified, if you later find out that a contributor was no good you need to be able to burn his content.

Saying that "I created this" isn't enough, you need to specify if it was derived or even inspired by anything, if it includes some textures you googled for, every little thing matters.

Saying that "i created the thing with such and such file name" isn't enough, you should include a md5sum, or a file that can not be later changed, we need to know exactly what you are endorsing.

Saying that "i got this from steve" isn't enough, you need to specify exactly who steve is, there might be 10 steves, you and only one other person may know who steve is, you need an exact forum name, or wiki name, lobby name is no good.

"here have this thing i made" isn't enough, it needs to be clearly licensed.

When your documenting stuff, don't settle for just some links(external websites die), make local copies in the database.

Big blob of maps we have:
can even a sliver of these maps be trusted? non free textures? textures lifted off some random website? map makers need to clearly define how absolute their owner ship is. map might say it was created by trustworthy X but it may have had some junk added in by Y, a central database helps with verification.

Temp usage of content with bad legal status:
Only works if you have a team of obsessive perfectionists.

The purity of your source code needs to be more closely guarded than other content, you shouldn't ever have to later come in remove something with ify licensing, source code contamination spreads and is hard to replace.

Keep licensing simple, don't do any PD -> GPL, BSD -> GPL, ? -> GPL, get it GPL strait from the original source, everything else goes to the trash can.

Make sure contributors understand that there is no taking it back, you may choose to honors such requests but you should make it clear that you don't want to end up in such a situation.

Are you claiming that people cant legally use lua or original models from CA in their own GPL compatible projects? That's a false statement. And seriously, what is your argument that CC-PD would be any better for the CA project? The problem is OTA derived content and neither license solves the problem any better than the other.

Here's one example, from the FSF site, about how the GPL would apply to "derivative works" btw:

In an object-oriented language such as Java, if I use a class that is GPL'ed without modifying, and subclass it, in what way does the GPL affect the larger program?

Subclassing is creating a derivative work. Therefore, the terms of the GPL affect the whole program where you create a subclass of a GPL'ed class.

Pretty damn clear, right there, imo.

Are you claiming that people cant legally use lua or original models from CA in their own GPL compatible projects?

Yes, because they're not really GPL. Meh, I think that based on the above from FSF, it's clear they can't be. So, therefore until challenged, the code's probably (C), and you can't GPL (C) stuff without explicit consent, such as the written consent I got from everybody involved with World Builder. I suppose they could just let some random person, not attached to the project, take the code and apply the GPL... then all agree again. That might solve that. Dunno, that definitely goes into lawyer territory.

And seriously, what is your argument that CC-PD would be any better for the CA project?

The various authors have stated repeatedly that they want people to use their work. GPL's copyleft provisions are a potential bane for all games that wish to remain (C), whilst CC-PD does not present that problem.

Let's put it another way, shall we? If I GPL'd P.U.R.E., I would have to bar IW, S'44, Evo, Gundam, E&E and bunch of other projects from using my source, and we'd be right back to Square One.

Ooh, wait... I could CC-PD it. Then BA would just incorporate it, or CA, or whatever, and guess what... that's not what I want to do, personally. What CA chooses to do is their business, of course.

[EDIT] "present", not "prevent", and now I'm going to bed.

Have fun arguing this stuff, please keep it clean, and also keep in mind that I am in no way, shape or form advocating some stupid crap like unilaterally saying that CA's code is all PD, or any "evil plan"-

I didn't say so in my OP, I'm not saying that period. I treated their code as GPL in the development of P.U.R.E., plain and simple, so meh, I mainly investigated this due to Smoth's post about it all, as so many people are worried about GPL's copyleft crap, which they should be, now that we know how it works[/EDIT]

Argh wrote:Here's one example, from the FSF site, about how the GPL would apply to "derivative works" btw:

In an object-oriented language such as Java, if I use a class that is GPL'ed without modifying, and subclass it, in what way does the GPL affect the larger program?

Subclassing is creating a derivative work. Therefore, the terms of the GPL affect the whole program where you create a subclass of a GPL'ed class.

Pretty damn clear, right there, imo.

That's bold statement for a situation not even bearing a passing resemblance to the situation CA is in.

Argh wrote:

Are you claiming that people cant legally use lua or original models from CA in their own GPL compatible projects?

Yes, because they're not really GPL. Meh, I think that based on the above from FSF, it's clear they can't be. So, therefore until challenged, the code's probably (C), and you can't GPL (C) stuff without explicit consent, such as the written consent I got from everybody involved with World Builder. I suppose they could just let some random person, not attached to the project, take the code and apply the GPL... then all agree again. That might solve that. Dunno, that definitely goes into lawyer territory.

No, this is completely false.
All of the lua and original models by the CA dev team are not derivative and are covered by the GPL

Argh wrote:

And seriously, what is your argument that CC-PD would be any better for the CA project?

The various authors have stated repeatedly that they want people to use their work. GPL's copyleft provisions are a potential bane for all games that wish to remain (C), whilst CC-PD does not prevent that problem.

Let's put it another way, shall we? If I GPL'd P.U.R.E., I would have to bar IW, S'44, Evo, Gundam, E&E and bunch of other projects from using my source, and we'd be right back to Square One.

Ooh, wait... I could CC-PD it. Then BA would just incorporate it, or CA, or whatever, and guess what... that's not what I want to do, personally. What CA chooses to do is their business, of course.

Actually, that is the whole point of the GPL. You can't use our stuff unless you are willing to share your stuff as well.

This has never gone to court, not even the GPL. We havent even been C&D'd yet.

If we are illegal in using GPL with OTA IP (probably so), then we will be illegal using your brand new licence with OTA IP as well. You can freely release under the GPL with no fear that OTA mods will use it- at least, legally. And since they dont use any of their stuff legally, well... they can use whatever licence you invent just as easily as they do the GPL- even if it expressly forbids them from doing so.

Ultimately what it comes down to is whether or not you (Or the OTA IP holders, whoever they are) C&D those who use your material.

If we submit GPL content to the CA SVN repository (And it -IS- GPL content, because it is our copyright at the moment of creation and is mixed with OTA IP later), and if doing so is illegal, then that is merely a licence violation (Of the GPL or OTA IP, pick one). Good thing we have no desire to C&D ourselves...

The moment we are free of OTA IP, all the GPL content stays intact, and stays GPL, and the violation goes away. If we C&D'd ourselves (Or ATARI/whoever did) tomorrow and then cleaned up the OTA IP to comply with the licence, we would be totally legal.

Honestly i would rather CA be Public Domain. But, i also think it would kinda suck if someone came along, took our content, improved it, benefited from it, and refused to share back.

I think its worth pointing out that this situation, non-gpl mod vs gpl mod , sort of parallels the drama that occurs between the BSD operating systems(close to PD) and the Linux operating systems (GPL).

The BSD operating systems felt pain similar to the non-gpl mods, yet Linux (GPL) didn't cave in.

Such drama has occurred for a long time and is a good source of knowledge.

Oh, a final note: if distributing alongside OTA content immediately invalidates your GPL then the whole spring project, which distributes alongside OTA content, is no longer GPL. Its Atari's derivative work.

So Argh- you should consider modding for a different engine, this one is proprietary.

Spring does not distribute the ota content, so that method of arguing is just dumb...

THat said... WHat's wrong with share-alike CC?

In particular this is my favorite:
Also saktoth, you're putting lipstick on a pig about it. Anything that uses OTA content is in all technicality illegal. We all know that. There isn't much point in denying it because it's straightforward and to the point.

However on the other hand, no one (including argh) is trying to banish CA nor any of the other *A mods. Personally I wish that we didn't have to deal with them but thats another story.

Forboding Angel wrote: Also saktoth, you're putting lipstick on a pig about it. Anything that uses OTA content is in all technicality illegal. We all know that. There isn't much point in denying it because it's straightforward and to the point.

However on the other hand, no one (including argh) is trying to banish CA nor any of the other *A mods. Personally I wish that we didn't have to deal with them but thats another story.

Argh is claiming that the original, non-derivative works in CA are somehow not subject to the GPL. He has a ridiculous conception of what "derivative" means, comparing a the CA distribution of independent parts with sub-classing in Java, of all things. This is _not_ an issue about whether or not the CA _distribution_ is infringing. Everyone knows the answer to that. So please stop pretending that is the issue. What's worse, is the dramatic, matter-of-fact manner in which he decided to share this "revalation" of his with us. He really has no idea what he is talking about.

Yay license wars - and you thought it was over.
Hmm that makes a nice title for a game...


pic related

Forboding Angel wrote:Spring does not distribute the ota content, so that method of arguing is just dumb...

The installer installs OTAcontent.sdz (though that is optional). Where is this file hosted, from where is it distributed?

There isn't much point in denying it because it's straightforward and to the point.

I asserted several times that of course using OTA content is illegal. But the moment we clean OTA content out of the mod, it becomes legal and the GPL content, the original works, stay GPL.

Personally I wish that we didn't have to deal with them but thats another story.

The feeling is mutual forb Oh wait, didnt Evo start as FunTA?