This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
Licenses other than the GPL
Opinions about how copyright law, licensing, and/or the GPL ought to work (as opposed to how it does work)
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
It's been bouncing around by $150, sometimes from minute to minute. I have no idea what the deal is with it, although in all honest I doubt it's the Patreon hack that caused it. Most likely a software bug. I'll find out what the real number is next time I collect Patreon funds, which will be at the end of the year.
no, I use a unique password for each site, which already makes my head dizzy. But why didn't we get an email about that, if there is something known about
I figured the announcement on the front page would suffice, although that was probably a bad call on my part. I'll see what I can do about sending out a mass mail.
Anyway, if you're using a unique password on OGA, then the only information they could have gotten is anything you've entered on the site. Since we don't even ask for your real name, I'm guessing that the only thing of interest to hackers would be your email (which is known to be compromised, since they emailed everyone) and your password (which is hashed and in your case unique to OGA).
I don't know for certain what all information they got, but it seems likely that if they were able to get a list of email addresses that they may have also been able to get at hashed passwords. I'm in the middle of running a scan on the server (it went all night and it's about half done), and it hasn't turned up anything yet.
Edit: Just to be clear, we don't store any Paypal or other payment account information here on OGA. Even though the email mentiones "Peypal", it doesn't mean they got any credit card or bank information. That being said, if your paypal or bank account uses the same email and password that you use on OGA, I strongly recommend that you change them immediately.
Hey, just wanted to let you guys know that I follow this thread, and I admire your dedication to a frequent release schedule and creating content. Keep it up. :)
The trouble with explicitly stating that the preview images must fall under the same license as the actual files is that that might not be true for some older preview images, and it's impossible to know which ones that doesn't apply to. caeles points to a completely legitimate edge case.
We already have a rule that the preview images have to reflect what's in the actual content, but I prefer that this be kept a judgement call rather than an absolute hard and fast requirement. The key is to avoid misleading previews.
Furthermore, I would actually kind of prefer that the preview images not be freely licensed, unless the author explicitly says they are. When I get around to preserving the pages of deleted content, I want to be able to preserve the preview images so that people can identify what the content was, and if the preview images themselves are freely licensed, then in many cases that's essentially the same as allowing people to download the originals against the artist's wishes. (Note: I also plan to watermark the images on deleted content and perhaps do some other processing so as to make them otherwise impractical to use).
Flagging license issues is something I really hate having to do, particularly since a lot of time if it happens on someone's first post, they just abandon it and never come back. I really would prefer to avoid adding additional situations where it would be necessary to do that. I'd much rather tell people that preview images are all rights reserved unless otherwise noted.
You mentioned in the other thread that you might be willing to rewrite the relevant changes to the FAQ yourself. which is something I'm not going to have time to do this week. If you can do that, I'll look over them and then merge the changes in.
This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
My experince with recaptcha is that it actually lets in far, far more spam.
It's been bouncing around by $150, sometimes from minute to minute. I have no idea what the deal is with it, although in all honest I doubt it's the Patreon hack that caused it. Most likely a software bug. I'll find out what the real number is next time I collect Patreon funds, which will be at the end of the year.
no, I use a unique password for each site, which already makes my head dizzy. But why didn't we get an email about that, if there is something known about
I figured the announcement on the front page would suffice, although that was probably a bad call on my part. I'll see what I can do about sending out a mass mail.
Anyway, if you're using a unique password on OGA, then the only information they could have gotten is anything you've entered on the site. Since we don't even ask for your real name, I'm guessing that the only thing of interest to hackers would be your email (which is known to be compromised, since they emailed everyone) and your password (which is hashed and in your case unique to OGA).
There's a blog post about this on the front page.
I don't know for certain what all information they got, but it seems likely that if they were able to get a list of email addresses that they may have also been able to get at hashed passwords. I'm in the middle of running a scan on the server (it went all night and it's about half done), and it hasn't turned up anything yet.
Edit: Just to be clear, we don't store any Paypal or other payment account information here on OGA. Even though the email mentiones "Peypal", it doesn't mean they got any credit card or bank information. That being said, if your paypal or bank account uses the same email and password that you use on OGA, I strongly recommend that you change them immediately.
@andmyman404: Where are you searching for this stuff? That sounds useful.
Looks neat. Is there someone we can read about it and download it?
Hey, just wanted to let you guys know that I follow this thread, and I admire your dedication to a frequent release schedule and creating content. Keep it up. :)
The trouble with explicitly stating that the preview images must fall under the same license as the actual files is that that might not be true for some older preview images, and it's impossible to know which ones that doesn't apply to. caeles points to a completely legitimate edge case.
We already have a rule that the preview images have to reflect what's in the actual content, but I prefer that this be kept a judgement call rather than an absolute hard and fast requirement. The key is to avoid misleading previews.
Furthermore, I would actually kind of prefer that the preview images not be freely licensed, unless the author explicitly says they are. When I get around to preserving the pages of deleted content, I want to be able to preserve the preview images so that people can identify what the content was, and if the preview images themselves are freely licensed, then in many cases that's essentially the same as allowing people to download the originals against the artist's wishes. (Note: I also plan to watermark the images on deleted content and perhaps do some other processing so as to make them otherwise impractical to use).
Flagging license issues is something I really hate having to do, particularly since a lot of time if it happens on someone's first post, they just abandon it and never come back. I really would prefer to avoid adding additional situations where it would be necessary to do that. I'd much rather tell people that preview images are all rights reserved unless otherwise noted.
You mentioned in the other thread that you might be willing to rewrite the relevant changes to the FAQ yourself. which is something I'm not going to have time to do this week. If you can do that, I'll look over them and then merge the changes in.
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