Well, the copyright holder can always license and re-license a work however they like (again provided there are not entanglements with other works (eg. a derivative of a CC-SA-BY work)).
They can freely offer the work under whatever terms the want, and can offer it under different licenses and allow users to select the license they wish to use it under.
What they cannot do is retroactively rescind a license once they have released the work under those terms. They don't have to continue to personally distribute the work under the license, but they can't sue or otherwise go after people for using the work under it's terms. Meaning, you can't release a work as CC-BY-3.0 one day, change your mind, switch it to CC-BY-SA and then sue someone who in good faith obtained to work under CC-BY-3.0 and used it under those terms.
Other than that, the original author/copyright holder, really has carte-blanche to do what they like.
As for 'upgrading', 'downgrading', etc. licenses from one to another, unless there is absolutely crystal clear language in the license itself which allows for transmutating itself (as with some GPL licenses), I'm very wary of such schemes. Even very liberal licenses like the MIT license, don't allow the text of the license itself to be altered or removed from a distribution, meaning you can add new terms if you like, but you can never fully convert the license to somethig else (unless that something happens to begin with the identical text from the MIT license) and you certainly can't simply replace the license with something deemed 'compatible'.
> Idea: Optionally select to bundle a copy of the (plain text) license(s) of the thing you are downloading with the download.
Yes! This is my holy grail idea for clarifying license stuff on OGA. I think every download should be a bundle of the work plus a readme with the author's name, available licenses and attribution instructions and a plain text copy of each available license.
However, I must admit that in addition to backend work that would be required to make this work, there have been a few use cases raised where this behavior would be annoying:
Although, reading your post just now, I had another brainstorm, instead of archiving the work with the license and all that, maybe an OK 2nd best solution would be just to roll the info into the filename. Again, a 2nd best solution, but I could still see it being useful.
I guess the format would be something like: imagename.username.license(...).file_extension
ex.
instead of 'reallycoolsprites.png'
the site could serve up:
reallycoolsprites.capbros.OGA-BY-3.0.GPL-2.0.png
Again, not the cleanest solution in the world, but it might work better than what we have now (aka nothing).
No worries, i think it might have just been in the comments for a submission and not a proper forum topic. And at any rate, repeatedly raising an issue is the best way to get it addressed ;)
As for the submissions, I can't recall which was the first I saw do this, but I was able to find a few just literally searching for '4.0'. Here's an example:
It's fantastic submission and you'd hate to see it pulled on a technicality but at the same time, in the bigger picture it's really critical that the works on here be licensed by the selected license(s), otherwise searching by license will be useless and everyone will just have to manually read the notes field from each submission to understand the terms for it's use.
Yeah, I had inquired about this on an earlier thread somewheres.
Aside from the advantages of cc-4.0 vs 3.0, the issue I see is that we've started to see submissions marked as cc-by-3.0 with a note stating the license is really cc-by-4.0. It doesn't quite seem fair to flag submissions for this when 4.0 is not provided as an option, but at the same time, it's not good for the long term health of the site to have things marked as one license but 'noted' as another.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - 17:08
Well, the point of the site is to host 'open' art, so probably charging for it would be a no go, even if the money went back to OGA. In fact, probably esp. if the money went back to OGA ;)
Still, if the art could be made available on the Unity storefront for 'free' with the licenses selected by the artists on OGA that could be pretty cool. Certainly, as you point out, it would get the work a lot more exposure.
Now, although I tossed it out there, I figured this idea was probably a non-starter because undoubtedly the Unity Asset store has it's own license that it imposes on the assets for sale there. Well, a little googling and sure enough that's true:
There is some fine print in there, which seems to leave the door open for assets to use alternate licenses. Specifically the last sentance of section 1.2 which states: "Certain Assets may be governed by a Provider end user license agreement."
I don't know if that would be 'in addition to' the Unity Asset Store license, in which case it would be useless for pretty much anything other than CC0 stuff.
Well, I would say the next step would be to try and contact the Unity folks and see if they have any interest in hosting OpenGameArt stuff in there and what the legal terms of doing something like that would look like.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - 06:50
@Chris_M_The_Game_Dude:
> I based this off of going back in time on the list of the sites assets and looking at the downloads.
Gotcha. Only caveat with that method would be that the longer something's been on the site, the more often it's likely to have been downloaded.
As for the Unity store, I wonder what it would take to get an 'OpenGameArt' section setup in their store?
No doubt the assets in their are more popular simply because they show up 'in-app' if you will.
Not sure how one rises to the rank of 'admin' but I will say I don't think it would be the worst thing if OGA appointed a few new admins as the some of the original set seem to be busy with other things now.
@Danimal: I think that's a really unfair characterization of the situation. Bart has been very active on the site since the paetron was setup and even just recently rolled out the internal messaging system. It's only in the last six months or so that he seems to have been absent for long stretches.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 12:42
Just want to say I support TheNess 100% on this one.
It's really uncool that this submission was flagged without any comment.
If there's a problem with it that's fine but at least let the submitter know what the issue is.
@TheNess: all I can say is this isn't the way things normally work around here. :(
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 08:10
yeah, this looks pretty amazing! especially for a first go!
my only comment would be that the animation is just shifts, no actual changes to the sprite itself.
It's pixel art, part of the magic is that each frame can be a custom image!
Still, what you have works ok for the most part, but her calves in particular look really stiff. You might try bending them in a little to match the motion of the thighs coming down, if that makes any sense.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 08:03
Although I agree it'd be a place to start, the problem with starting this as a forum is that it'll basically be invisible to anyone browsing the site. Even if they ventured into the forums section, unless it literally gets a new submission every other day or is somehow marked 'sticky' it'll drop to the bottom of the list pretty quickly.
Well, not trying to be a downer, just thinking out loud I guess. :(
Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 07:52
yikes! is that true?
It seems like OGA is still attracting a very steady stream of submissions.
One thing I do find saddening is that the amount of admin/mod activity seems to have really fallen off in the last year. I know there are a few volunteer mods that do the best they can, but it just seems like we don't hear from the admins as often as we did even a year ago. :(
To your point about affiliates, I guess more affiliates is always nice, but if I google 'free game art' OpenGameArt.org is the top result and as far as attracting traffic goes, I'm guessing that trumps anything else by a factor of 10.
@cron:
Well, the copyright holder can always license and re-license a work however they like (again provided there are not entanglements with other works (eg. a derivative of a CC-SA-BY work)).
They can freely offer the work under whatever terms the want, and can offer it under different licenses and allow users to select the license they wish to use it under.
What they cannot do is retroactively rescind a license once they have released the work under those terms. They don't have to continue to personally distribute the work under the license, but they can't sue or otherwise go after people for using the work under it's terms. Meaning, you can't release a work as CC-BY-3.0 one day, change your mind, switch it to CC-BY-SA and then sue someone who in good faith obtained to work under CC-BY-3.0 and used it under those terms.
Other than that, the original author/copyright holder, really has carte-blanche to do what they like.
As for 'upgrading', 'downgrading', etc. licenses from one to another, unless there is absolutely crystal clear language in the license itself which allows for transmutating itself (as with some GPL licenses), I'm very wary of such schemes. Even very liberal licenses like the MIT license, don't allow the text of the license itself to be altered or removed from a distribution, meaning you can add new terms if you like, but you can never fully convert the license to somethig else (unless that something happens to begin with the identical text from the MIT license) and you certainly can't simply replace the license with something deemed 'compatible'.
> Idea: Optionally select to bundle a copy of the (plain text) license(s) of the thing you are downloading with the download.
Yes! This is my holy grail idea for clarifying license stuff on OGA. I think every download should be a bundle of the work plus a readme with the author's name, available licenses and attribution instructions and a plain text copy of each available license.
However, I must admit that in addition to backend work that would be required to make this work, there have been a few use cases raised where this behavior would be annoying:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/on-the-importance-of-citable-license-g...
Although, reading your post just now, I had another brainstorm, instead of archiving the work with the license and all that, maybe an OK 2nd best solution would be just to roll the info into the filename. Again, a 2nd best solution, but I could still see it being useful.
I guess the format would be something like: imagename.username.license(...).file_extension
ex.
instead of 'reallycoolsprites.png'
the site could serve up:
reallycoolsprites.capbros.OGA-BY-3.0.GPL-2.0.png
Again, not the cleanest solution in the world, but it might work better than what we have now (aka nothing).
No worries, i think it might have just been in the comments for a submission and not a proper forum topic. And at any rate, repeatedly raising an issue is the best way to get it addressed ;)
As for the submissions, I can't recall which was the first I saw do this, but I was able to find a few just literally searching for '4.0'. Here's an example:
http://opengameart.org/content/toens-medieval-strategy-sprite-pack-v10-1...
It's fantastic submission and you'd hate to see it pulled on a technicality but at the same time, in the bigger picture it's really critical that the works on here be licensed by the selected license(s), otherwise searching by license will be useless and everyone will just have to manually read the notes field from each submission to understand the terms for it's use.
Yeah, I had inquired about this on an earlier thread somewheres.
Aside from the advantages of cc-4.0 vs 3.0, the issue I see is that we've started to see submissions marked as cc-by-3.0 with a note stating the license is really cc-by-4.0. It doesn't quite seem fair to flag submissions for this when 4.0 is not provided as an option, but at the same time, it's not good for the long term health of the site to have things marked as one license but 'noted' as another.
Well, the point of the site is to host 'open' art, so probably charging for it would be a no go, even if the money went back to OGA. In fact, probably esp. if the money went back to OGA ;)
Still, if the art could be made available on the Unity storefront for 'free' with the licenses selected by the artists on OGA that could be pretty cool. Certainly, as you point out, it would get the work a lot more exposure.
Now, although I tossed it out there, I figured this idea was probably a non-starter because undoubtedly the Unity Asset store has it's own license that it imposes on the assets for sale there. Well, a little googling and sure enough that's true:
https://unity3d.com/legal/as_terms
but...
There is some fine print in there, which seems to leave the door open for assets to use alternate licenses. Specifically the last sentance of section 1.2 which states: "Certain Assets may be governed by a Provider end user license agreement."
I don't know if that would be 'in addition to' the Unity Asset Store license, in which case it would be useless for pretty much anything other than CC0 stuff.
Well, I would say the next step would be to try and contact the Unity folks and see if they have any interest in hosting OpenGameArt stuff in there and what the legal terms of doing something like that would look like.
@Chris_M_The_Game_Dude:
> I based this off of going back in time on the list of the sites assets and looking at the downloads.
Gotcha. Only caveat with that method would be that the longer something's been on the site, the more often it's likely to have been downloaded.
As for the Unity store, I wonder what it would take to get an 'OpenGameArt' section setup in their store?
No doubt the assets in their are more popular simply because they show up 'in-app' if you will.
Not sure how one rises to the rank of 'admin' but I will say I don't think it would be the worst thing if OGA appointed a few new admins as the some of the original set seem to be busy with other things now.
@Danimal: I think that's a really unfair characterization of the situation. Bart has been very active on the site since the paetron was setup and even just recently rolled out the internal messaging system. It's only in the last six months or so that he seems to have been absent for long stretches.
Just want to say I support TheNess 100% on this one.
It's really uncool that this submission was flagged without any comment.
If there's a problem with it that's fine but at least let the submitter know what the issue is.
@TheNess: all I can say is this isn't the way things normally work around here. :(
yeah, this looks pretty amazing! especially for a first go!
my only comment would be that the animation is just shifts, no actual changes to the sprite itself.
It's pixel art, part of the magic is that each frame can be a custom image!
Still, what you have works ok for the most part, but her calves in particular look really stiff. You might try bending them in a little to match the motion of the thighs coming down, if that makes any sense.
Although I agree it'd be a place to start, the problem with starting this as a forum is that it'll basically be invisible to anyone browsing the site. Even if they ventured into the forums section, unless it literally gets a new submission every other day or is somehow marked 'sticky' it'll drop to the bottom of the list pretty quickly.
Well, not trying to be a downer, just thinking out loud I guess. :(
yikes! is that true?
It seems like OGA is still attracting a very steady stream of submissions.
One thing I do find saddening is that the amount of admin/mod activity seems to have really fallen off in the last year. I know there are a few volunteer mods that do the best they can, but it just seems like we don't hear from the admins as often as we did even a year ago. :(
To your point about affiliates, I guess more affiliates is always nice, but if I google 'free game art' OpenGameArt.org is the top result and as far as attracting traffic goes, I'm guessing that trumps anything else by a factor of 10.
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