$12256 / $11500
I propose the following:
This way, I feel like it might be possible to both allow a lot of "legacy" licenses while remaining mostly simple to the users and contributors. The use of the "OGA approved" licenses should be encouraged (through the license picker) and possibly even enforced for "regular-user" contributions (controversial?).
The reason for encouraging/enforcing licenses are that, while the freedoms might be very similiar, the legal text used might not be compatible. We should not force the use of a certain set of "freedoms".
Tell me what you think.
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
There are three issues at play here. These are:
Obviously #1 is a non-issue for this particular question, since the licenses you're listing are all "safe". The problem, really, is the balance between allowing a large number of licenses and keeping things simple for the user. It's one thing if you're a hardcore Free Software Licensing Geek, but it's quite another if you're a regular user who'd just like to use (or donate) some art and have a clear understanding of the conditions.
To this end, I'd like to propose a standard that we can use in order to determine whether a license should be added. The license (obviously) must satisfy our requirement that the content can be bundled with the GPL. It must also satisfy one of these two conditions:
In the latter case, I would suggest that, in order to avoid confusion, the additional license be available to site editors only.
This really brings up the need for the simplified licensing options, which I've been avoiding because it's going to be fairly hard to implement. I should probably get started on that.
Bart
I might not have been very clear about this, but the entire point was to separate the users/contributors and the licenses as much as possible :). Essentially, with a bit of sugar coating ("common deeds" alike, "sorting by freedom" rather than "by license"), you can mostly hide the license complexity from the users. A similiar approach would be used for the contributors, eg. a "license picker wizard", which really selects "freedoms" rather than licenses. OGA then choses appropriate licenses. The "legacy" licenses (not really legacy, but whatever) would need editor approval, maybe.
The general idea being that by describing "freedoms", several licenses end up being pretty much the same thing (eg. modified bsd and x11). Oh, and I have another, related, cool art pack idea. We really need those ;).
EDIT: And yeah - I agree with what you said. However, I believe the license situation is already to complicated, and the users/contributors should be spared from dealing with any licenses (including "simple" ones like the GPL) as much as possible. The art pack idea would essentially let you collect the art you wanted to use (and possibly specify a project license), and it would tell you if the art was compatible.
So my take on this would be to have the following license selection.
The idea is, that selecting "[ ] open source use only" will js/auto-select ccbysa/gpl2/gpl3.
I think I have to agree with cenian, who told me on IRC that the liecnses should be hidden away more. If the 'advanced' option is one click away, I'd have no reason to complain. How about a "[ ] advanced view" checkbox, which will java-scriptley make all the exact licenses appear and disappear?
Also the 'newer licenses permitted' should beonly seen in 'advanced' mode. 'Yes' would be default.
PS: Also, I would suggest to not permit cc-xx-2.0 licenses at all. If there's some art under that license around, it'd be better if the 'harvesters' would ask for new version permission.
I was going to upload something that I previously uploaded to my DeviantArt page, when I realise that CC-by-nc-sa is not an option with OGA. Is there a reason for that?
NC-licensed works can't be distributed alongside of Free (as in speech) software due to the fact that they prevent you from selling the work commercially. CC-BY-SA provides a similar (albeit imperfect) protection from commercial exploitation by forcing the distributor to give your work away for free if they are selling it.
Hmm. I haven't thought of CC-BY-SA that way, and I don't understand how that works. This is the image in question... the original is a high res version capable of up to 9'x6' prints. If someone decides to use this as the basis for the board of a commercial boardgame (digital or otherwise), how does CC-BY-SA get invoked?
The proposed group license picker might be fine for original works.
Derivative works pretty much require the user to know how each license works.
> how does CC-BY-SA get invoked?
Just a guess, but I suppose it would mean that the board would have to be BY-SA as well, which means that you could scan/photograph it and re-distribute under BY-SA.
I'm not sure how high reoslution that print is, but if it's really printable at 9 by 6 feet, it must be pretty huge. Even if it's 9 by 6 inches, at 300dpi that's higher than most people would need. I'd venture to say that it's bigger than someone would want if they were going to put it into a computer game. Just downscale it to wallpaper resolution (or twice that or whatever) and license the downscaled version CC-BY-SA, and keep the NC license on the original.
> I'd venture to say that it's bigger than someone would want if they were going to put it into a computer game. Just downscale it to wallpaper resolution (or twice that or whatever) and license the downscaled version CC-BY-SA, and keep the NC license on the original.
What if I want a small piece of the map? Then the full size would be of interest.
> What if I want a small piece of the map? Then the full size would be of interest.
This is true.
Anyway, as I've stated in the past, it's generally unwise to include CC-BY-SA material in a product that's not share-alike in general, because in the case of games, it's fairly ambiguous what you consider to be a "work." You'd have a case in court that the whole game constitutes a work, and most publishers would prefer to avoid being sued. To really avoid something like this, you would have to distribute the board completely separately, which would be more trouble than it's worth.
My point, though, is that if Toeholds doesn't want to distribute the whole map in high res under CC-BY-SA, it would still be good to get it in wallpaper size. Also, maybe he could cut it into wallpaper-sized images by contintent, too.
Bart
@pfunked This is why we should have a "remix" feature. It's not perfect, but would cover a lot of cases.
I didn't know that you could license different sizes of the same image differently. Does that mean if someone resize it to 99% its original size, it's a different "work"? (What is the definition/scope of remix?) But yes, the full image is ~500Mb, with a little bit of work going into it. The initial thought about putting it on OGA is that any subpiece would be of sufficient resolution to use "out of the box", and that make it usable directly by people working on both Roman conquest as well as Japanese feudal strategy (open source) games.
In any case, this whole licensing thing is over my head. I'll (once again) hold off until I can understand what it takes and what it means to put things on OGA. I support the idea of OGA, but signing off on things that I don't understand doesn't sit well with me. What may help is if you folks could have some "typical scenarios" for the licenses, e.g., a table like
[b]Use in a commercial game as is[/b] GPL LGPL CC-by
[b]Use in a commercial game with modification[/b] GPL LGPL CC-by CC-by-sa
[b]Use in a non-commercial game as is[/b] GPL LGPL CC-by CC-by-sa CC-nc CC-by-sa-nc
[b]Use in a commercial, open-source game as is[/b]
[b]Use in a non-commercial, non-open-source game as is[/b]
.
.
.
(but that may get out of hand...)
You can use as many licensees on your own works as you like. Using one license does not remove your own rights to the art, but it gives permission to others.
All art here can be used in *commercial* art.
But there are various restrictions, depending on lincense and for example GPL and BY-SA might require the game to be open source.or that if the image is changed in any way, it and the changes have to be pointed out and everyone who owns a copy with the art can use it just as the game developer did with your art..
I wrote 'or' because there has not yet been a case where a judge decided whether the whole game counts as a 'derivate work' or if only the image does. However, since there is a chance, that the whole game might count as a derivate work and thus would have to be released under GPL/By-Sa, commercial game developers are most likely avoiding art under these licenses.
I'm a content dev for a GPL game that uses GPL content. I'm wondering why no one seems to release art under GPL.
I find alot of nice work but am unable to use any of it becuse it is not GPL.
I understand that our content base does not HAVE to be GPL but the existing content is and we are stuck with a GPL content mandate.
I would like to encourage that artist's cross liscence there work so that more can be used in GPL projects.
MerlinX420,
- Ideally we want to move away from allowing GPL as an art license, because the GNU and FSF folks don't recommend using GPL for art
- In Reality we can't because the behemoths of free games (e.g. Wesnoth) are still under the GPL mandate.
Hard to choose what to do. Hopefully new projects don't do GPL content mandates so we can move past this eventually.
This is a weekly discussion/argument in our IRC channel.
GPL could classify as a jurisdiction-virus: One of its symptoms is the inability to merge with non-GPL artifacts - another the urge to assimilate and spread itself.
Interesting to see humans execute the GPL-code.
Thinking about GPL as "viral" is weird to me. These copyleft licences merely say "if you are also doing open stuff, you don't even have to ask permission to use this stuff I made". Otherwise it's a regular copyright issue: talk to the author to license it the way you want.
It might behoove us to set up the licensing wizard so that it selects every "less free" license than the one you picked. For instance, if you say you just want attribution, it would select CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, and GPL, thus keeping the art open for GPL-mandated projects.
On the other hand, I would strongly encourage such projects to modernize their licensing requirements, unless there's a very good reason not to do so.
Finally, I'm not an expert on this, but it may be possible to GPL something that's been released under CC-BY. DON'T DO THIS WITHOUT LOOKING INTO IT FIRST.
Bart
OSARE operates under the assumption that CC-BY items can be used in a GPL project. I assume attribution is not a restriction over and above GPL.
They can. There's nothing in CC-BY or the GPL that prevents you from mixing. What I was getting at is I'm not sure you can take CC-BY content and say that that particular content is ALSO GPLed. It might be possible, though.