Quote:I think a CC license of some type might be better for the data
I think I recall the debian packager saying that the CC license wasn't acceptable for debian... I didn't really understand why. Does anyone want to venture a guess...?
joevenzon Wrote:I think I recall the debian packager saying that the CC license wasn't acceptable for debian... I didn't really understand why. Does anyone want to venture a guess...?
that's because (a small but very vocal subset of) debian developers have gone nuts (i've been a debian developer since '98 but i am not contributing any more for this very reason). it's started innocuous enough, but lately they've been complaining about having to include the licences themselves because their text cannot be modified so they are not free. go figure! this is one of the reasons i reacted so strongly to this whole licencing issue. but i make my offer again. if anybody finds a gpl track or manages to convince the original authors to re-release it under gpl or any free licence, i'll make it into a vdrift track (preferably it should be from the games mentioned in my original message).
--alex--
Distribution politics and license nazis are hard for me to understand, but then again so are lawyers...and that's really who licenses are made for. Without lawyers, I can't imagine why we would even need licenses for software.
As much as I hate worrying about this kind of crap, I also don't want to see it hinder the project's success. So I think the best way to deal with it is basically to provide a technological workaround, so users can still get the data they want regardless of license status, but the game can be distributed far and wide under a fully open license. I think the solution is a game data management application, which hopefully I'll get started coding soon.
thelusiv Wrote:As much as I hate worrying about this kind of crap, I also don't want to see it hinder the project's success. So I think the best way to deal with it is basically to provide a technological workaround, so users can still get the data they want regardless of license status, but the game can be distributed far and wide under a fully open license. I think the solution is a game data management application, which hopefully I'll get started coding soon.
x2
I'm not sure if it is still the case, but once upon a time in order to compile mplayer from source with all the proprietary codecs there was an an extra step related to the licence you had to go through in order make it happen.
Also, some ebuilds in Gentoo make you cross your fingers and read the fine print as well.
In the case of vdrift with a data manager, if you selected "proprietary" data and press ok, maybe a simple dialog box with "There be dragons beyond this point" would make sense. Sort of a EULA and as enforcable but it proves some attempt at due diligence for the lawyer types.
I guess Fedora should wait for the one car / one track that the vdrift devs have been talking about - and/or the data manager component before including in the distro. I haven't touched Fedora in a few years, does it have an automated mechanism to do SRC RPM fetch and build via yum/apt? That might be a quick work around as well if the hosting repo would spray some legalese crap to the screen during the fetch process.
Just some thoughts.
reece146 Wrote:In the case of vdrift with a data manager, if you selected "proprietary" data and press ok, maybe a simple dialog box with "There be dragons beyond this point" would make sense. Sort of a EULA and as enforcable but it proves some attempt at due diligence for the lawyer types.
I guess Fedora should wait for the one car / one track that the vdrift devs have been talking about - and/or the data manager component before including in the distro. I haven't touched Fedora in a few years, does it have an automated mechanism to do SRC RPM fetch and build via yum/apt? That might be a quick work around as well if the hosting repo would spray some legalese crap to the screen during the fetch process.
Fedora would be fine with a data manager, AFAIK. There is no automated SRPM fetch/build process that I know of. As it is, I can add any tracks/cars that don't pass muster in Fedora to the Dribble repo. If I'm maintaining both the Fedora RPMs and the Dribble RPMs, then users of Dribble won't have to worry about data migration as tracks and cars get cleared for fedora. I can move data from one RPM to the other in an orderly fashion and the user won't notice. I think packaging the legally dubious data for Dribble would be fine, and negate the need for a data manager.
And at risk of repeating myself, the reason I'm jumping through the lawyer-satisfying hoops and encouraging others to follow is not out of some ideological zeal or pathological fetish, but out of simple self-interest. I want to play Vdrift on Fedora, allow others to do so easily, and not get sued. Period. I can't imagine what's objectionable about that. Fedora has to follow U.S. copright law because that's where it's located.
Any progress on an all-enuncumbered release or a parking lot track?
Progress, yes, but nothing finished yet.
Rough ETA? Just curious. I can wait.
To come back to licensing. I've deleted the license files for the cars/tracks I've made. They are all GPL so the COPYING/License file of Vdrift itself will do fine, that way there won't be a problem with Debian etc.
The parkinglot is progressing fine.
Which cars and track would those be? If it's a decent subset of both, I could package that now and release the next version with the new licensing.
Tracks: none yet, working on CarolinaMP and Parkinglot.
Cars: allot
lets see on the top of my head: G4, TL, C7, MI, MC, M3, M8, RS2 and a few more.
Hello,
Are there any advances in this license issue ?
I'm contributing to a
French Open Source Game website accepting only 100% Open Source games (source code and data) and I would be glad to add VDrift to our collection.
The source code is all open source. Some of the data is either original or used with the explicit permission of the original author. The biggest problem with licensing of the data has probably been 1) there doesn't seem to be a standard "open source" license for data that everyone agrees on, and 2) we haven't done as good a job as we could have in documenting the license status of each piece of data. The best source for info about where a car or track came from is the about.txt file in the folder.
Thx for your reply.
Free Software isn't it define by the Free Software Foundation ?
According to the latter, "Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it."
If some car models cannot be freely used, shared, studied and modified, then they are not free *according to the FSF*.
Is this the case ?
Cheers.
It depends on the terms under which each piece of data was given to us. My recollection is that all of the data included with the 12-26-2007 release and the 2-23-2008 windows release was released to us under terms that would fit that definition.