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Or, a Fedora user's lament.
As I'm sure many of you know, AssaultCube is freeware. This means that you can all get it for zero cost, which is all fine and dandy. Unfortunately, this also means that certain Linux distributions can't put official packages in their repositories, and it also means that there's a dangerous net of legal issues around modifying the game. The Cube engine is written under the GPL license which SHOULD be perfect for distribution, but unfortunately AC has a great deal of its art assets under non-free licenses.
My main proposal is that an initiative is launched for the community to provide GPL-licensed art, such as crosshairs, sound effects, and other assets, and that we talk with the dev team to get these included either in the standard distribution of the game or in an alternative FOSS package. The benefits of this are many: it allows the developers more freedom to adopt assets and dispose of them as needed, it's easier to make mods and forks of the game, and it makes official packaging for Linux distributions much easier.
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23 Sep 12, 10:28PM
(This post was last modified: 23 Sep 12, 10:31PM by Nightmare.)
Say hi to Linux Mint. \:D
Lots of open source games, especially popular and successful ones, do this. It's usually to prevent forks, because there are always community splits on ideas and such. Would be shooting themselves in the foot.
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Linux Mint is a really nice Distro, but there are a couple of reasons that I don't like it, the biggest of which is that apt is awful.
Either way, I think it's a tad silly to use a GPL engine on something you don't want forked.
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(23 Sep 12, 09:48PM)tinkerttoy Wrote: The Cube engine is written under the GPL license No. Zlib-like with an added sort-of-copyleft clause:
README_CUBEENGINE.txt Wrote:Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it
freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not
claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software
in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be
appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
additional clause specific to Cube:
4. Source versions may not be "relicensed" under a different license
without my explicitly written permission.
(23 Sep 12, 09:48PM)tinkerttoy Wrote: My main proposal is that an initiative is launched for the community to provide GPL-licensed art No, please. If you do a relicensing, choose a sensible license. How sensible the GPL is for code is disputable, but for art it's really not a good idea. Of course, I don't want to tell you what to do (if you find enough GPL-licensed replacement stuff, thats fine), I'm just stating my opinion.
The crosshairs are a non-issue, they're all CC-by-sa. Many sounds are also under some free license.
One big issue are maps. Next to none are freely licensed, and they're (obviously) very hard to replace. Another are textures - most are under varying proprietary licenses and would be hard to replace as well.
Either way, specially given the current state of AC development, there are more pressing issues. The thing is that most people care more about having good artwork in a good game than having artwork that complies with the licensing guidelines of some linux distros. Plus, the stuff can almost always go in -unfree anyway.
Notwithstanding, if people actually manage to find equivalent freely-licensed replacement artwork, that would be optimal, and I'm sure everyone would be happy about that.
(23 Sep 12, 10:28PM)Nightmare Wrote: Lots of open source games, especially popular and successful ones, do this. It's usually to prevent forks, because there are always community splits on ideas and such. Not really, no. Often finding freely-licensed game art is a real challenge (although it got a lot better in the past few years with OpenGameArt, BlendSwap etc.). Also, some stuff (e.g. Quake textures) was made and published when Creative Commons licenses didn't even exist.
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I got that from a thread where some guy was raging about warsow 1.0's media stuff not being free and useable to all. ^_^;
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Okay, that was bad wording from my side too. I actually meant "usually not".
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Hi guys :)
i see that AC is a problematic package for all GNU/Linux distros due to licenses adopted by media content.
There is some plane (maybe for next major version?) to replace nonfree data in the future?
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Read tempest's post above. A lot of the content is free but what isn't (such as maps and textures) is hard to replace.
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It's ok, but is some dev interested about a gradual replacement with free media or not?
I use only Free Software on my computers and i wanna be able to play with AC in the future.
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May i ask: (sorry i'm a lot ignorant in this stuff)
What exactly they mean by non free stuff, and why it isn't an issue in other platforms?
sorry if i'm going out of the topic.
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(31 Oct 12, 09:36AM)Guest One Wrote: It's ok, but is some dev interested about a gradual replacement with free media or not?
I use only Free Software on my computers and i wanna be able to play with AC in the future. Interested, yes. Willing to do it, most likely no.
(31 Oct 12, 11:03AM)jAcKRoCk* Wrote: What exactly they mean by non free stuff, and why it isn't an issue in other platforms?
sorry if i'm going out of the topic.
Non-free, as in "does not allow everyone to modify and redistribute" (except for some conditions, which almost all free licenses have, e.g. must redistribute under same license).
Some (Linux) distributions accept only stuff with only free licenses into their main software repositories, and have guidelines defining which licenses qualify, such as the DFSG.
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I allready have thought about this issue.
I want to contact the main distributions to package our game. I´ll see how many got a problem with our licensing ...
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01 Nov 12, 12:40AM
(This post was last modified: 01 Nov 12, 12:45AM by SKB.)
(31 Oct 12, 11:58PM)ärkefiende Wrote: I allready have thought about this issue.
I want to contact the main distributions to package our game. I´ll see how many got a problem with our licensing ... AssaultCube is in Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Arch, openSUSE repos, so that's like the biggest linux desktop share covered already.
Edit: also in FreeBSD ports tree
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I´ll contact them anyways, I want to know if we can help them packaging easier aaaaaaand faster ;)
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Why not try to make a little effort?
Historical games like UFO:AI have did this ---> http://ufoai.org/wiki/News/2012#We_did_it.21
This is a gradual work, maybe AC devs can work on this for the next major release ;-)
Free Software users of distros like Trisquel, Parabola GNU/Linux and others would like to have a libre AC (actually no package in repositories due to non-free licenses).
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19 Dec 12, 08:23PM
(This post was last modified: 19 Dec 12, 08:29PM by Boomhauer.)
(23 Sep 12, 10:28PM)Nightmare Wrote: Say hi to Linux Mint. \:D
Lots of open source games, especially popular and successful ones, do this. It's usually to prevent forks, because there are always community splits on ideas and such. Would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Yea, Nightmare.. Mint sucks because of the constant conflicts in apt.
I have used Fedora though tinkerttoy. I think I recall having to use Alien to install AC without compiling, using the deb package.
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(01 Nov 12, 10:38AM)ärkefiende Wrote: I´ll contact them anyways, I want to know if we can help them packaging easier aaaaaaand faster ;)
You should try to talk also with devs of Free Software distros http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html i think that the Free Software community can help you to replace non-free assets.
I'm a Parabola GNU/Linux and Trisquel user, i wanna be able to play with AC (there are a lot of Free Software users that want this, so please help us).
Thanks.
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