GPL DISCUSSION - Page 4

GPL DISCUSSION

Discuss game development here, from a distinct game project to an accessible third-party mutator, down to the interaction and design of individual units if you like.

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Felix the Cat
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Post by Felix the Cat »

KDR_11k wrote:You don't automatically pay their legal expenses.
In the US it's very typical for the judgment against the losing party in a civil action to specify that the losing party must pay the winning party's legal expenses (as well as all court fees).
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

Basically, all I am seeing here is more bullshit. Not one of you offered me another license that would resolve this and give me what I require.

If you're not going to accept my right to license my work, and NanoBlobs is illegal, I want it removed from Spring- some other clever folks are more than welcome to write something that cannot be legally challenged. I'm through with this.

I am not sharing any future work on BOS animation. No more code samples, no explanations, no more walkthroughs, and I will not include un-compiled BOS code in the final mod, so that even if you can pretty easily reverse-engineer the resulting scripts, it will still eat up hours of your lives.

And if I get really bored, I will start doing other things to make reverse-engineering my work painful and annoying.

Happy now?
Lippy
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Post by Lippy »

Make love not war.



(Not man on man though, cos thats nasty :P)
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rcdraco
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oh no

Post by rcdraco »

Argh, this community is like one big family.

You for instance are the crazy uncle who gives us neat things, but nobody understands.

Fang is the Teenager with ADD and has a short fuse.

Smoth is guy who gives out the cool fireworks and robot toys.

Caydr is the guy who multitasks himself to death and helps the kids build things.

SuperNoob is the nerd who knows a lot, but never leaves his house.
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Peet
Malcontent
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Re: oh no

Post by Peet »

rcdraco wrote:blah
And you're the guy in the basement who has no clue as to what goes on elsewhere?
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rcdraco
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nope

Post by rcdraco »

I'm the kid who thinks he knows what he's doing.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

No.

Because, for those of you who have conveniently forgotten, here's the chronology of me sharing my knowledge with the other modders around here:

1. I teach everybody how to make S3O not just a technical curiousity. Result? I get treated with disrespect, get flamed by random asshats, and take down my information about how to get things done. It took people months to put together tutorials, and they still suck compared to what I gave out.

2. I kick-start development of the explosiongenerators, and go through a week straight of 3-hours-of-sleep to rush and get my latest works, including my nuke simulation, into NanoBlobs. Result? Argh still gets treated like crap, people use his work like crazy without credits.

3. I start publically talking about making more-efficient animations in Spring. This is a very helpful conversation, for the most part, and I learned a lot in the process. Result? I get done, write a lot of new code that, despite the horrendous LIES stated by zszwg, who has conveniently left out the important parts of the NanoBlobs code (i.e., the nifty six-legged walkscript for the SpireRook, the much-simplified Factory code in the AutoFac, the constrained-arc code for the Strider, the use of FX within a COB, and other stuff that was, at the time, groundbreaking work... then I release all of this stuff under the GPL, and get flamed repeatedly by ASSHATS, get my work used once, by Fanger, who simply made a mistake, and everybody then assumes that since I called Fanger on the use of GPL'd code within a non-GPL'd mod, that I was out to get them. Which is retarded, since I went out of my way to leave comments in, etc.

4. I am making new scripts, using an entirely new set of methods, that have finally addressed some very important issues. I am not going to talk about it, share it, or give it out under a license that makes it legal to use, because ASSHATs have continued to be allowed to spray their noxious, foul LIES and besmirch my good name.

I have given way too much time to this issue already, and you have collectively proceeded to waste more of it, by failing to realize that if my basic needs aren't met, and I cannot license my work, then I do not want to allow you to use it, period, without the possibility of legal sanction. In short, if you cannot play fair, then I am done with the game. What part of that is so hard to understand, people? There are whole pages devoted to the lies and spurious logic of ASSHATS who simply want to "win" the argument and have the dubious pleasures of a moral victory over my supposedly-evil intentions. Nevermind that the results basically screw ALL OF YOU out of the benefits of using my work!

I do not believe NanoBlobs does not qualify for protection under the GPL, I do not accept these spurious bullshit arguments that, "oh, it's not original, and blah blah blah", which is CRAP, because most of the stuff I did was not like work that came before, and where the structure might have been similar, the specifics were certainly NOT. I do not accept any of this. You can treat NanoBlobs like it's illegal work, and steal whatever you want- I can't stop you, and I'm not going to bother. But I'm never, EVER going to give you that level of help again.

That, folks, is where treating me like crap always goes! You want me to be nice and share my brilliant thoughts with you, but you do not want to play fair in return!

And, with BOS code, it's rather important, because if there's anything where zszwg and I actually agree, it's that there aren't very many methods of doing the most important things! When I get done with what I'm working on, which is a fundamental re-examination of how certain things work, you're going to regret, very much, that you didn't collectively tell these guys to shut up and leave me alone.
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rcdraco
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sorry

Post by rcdraco »

Sorry for those people that stole your stuff Argh. Especially since their mods that use them aren't GPL. I'll agree with you all though, OTA mods need to stop, and free mods need to come in. It's ridiculous that people don't respect you, I mean seriously, you made a mod that we could only dream of, models that look nothing short of beautiful, and amazing effects that even Smoth can't match.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

That's not true- there are plenty of projects out with better FX now, including the next XTA. I appreciate the thought, though.

And yes, I'd strongly prefer that everybody just quit whining, accept that under some sort of license that at least some of their code would fall under Fair Use provisions (whether this is GPL or whatever is irrelevant to me, but again, nobody even bothered offering up a well-tested alternative license) if they use my code, and then ... well, gee, we'd all be happy.

However, this isn't about happiness, apparently. Certainly, none of this has made me happy. And if it doesn't make me happy, then there's no point in doing it. I am not being paid for this, and I am not a receptacle for your abusive behavioral problems. If I thought you were all good people with excellent morals, I'd have never bothered with a license scheme in the first place, and look... everything I see here shows that I'm right, and that there's a fundamental problem here.

Spring, without a solid license system in place, and fair-use provisions to keep code public, is just a waste of time for developing anything serious. Because sooner or later, somebody will realize what all of the new technology in the engine is good for, and then they will become very, very interested in taking novel methods out of play. You guys are basically pushing me into a corner here, by not leaving me any choices that allow me to share with you and guarantee that I can continue to use my work in the future, no matter what happens. It's just irrational to believe that this can continue to happen without more people just dropping out of the being helpful category entirely.

Look at all the hand-wringing Smoth went through, with the FX stuff in Gundam? Like me, he wanted to share some of his amazing work. Unlike me, he was unwilling to give away the entire game design. It took him awhile to work out how to do so. But you still can't use his scripts...

Again, people... this stuff is just hurting you. It's not really hurting me, other than hurting my feelings, by rejecting what I've offered you with minimal strings attached, to ensure that you use what I've given you appropriately. You're really just hurting yourselves here. But I can't make those choices for you, and I can't spend any more time on this issue, because I have to get back to what's actually important here, which is writing more great animation code.
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FLOZi
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Post by FLOZi »

Argh wrote:Basically, all I am seeing here is more bullshit. Not one of you offered me another license that would resolve this and give me what I require.

If you're not going to accept my right to license my work, and NanoBlobs is illegal, I want it removed from Spring- some other clever folks are more than welcome to write something that cannot be legally challenged. I'm through with this.

I am not sharing any future work on BOS animation. No more code samples, no explanations, no more walkthroughs, and I will not include un-compiled BOS code in the final mod, so that even if you can pretty easily reverse-engineer the resulting scripts, it will still eat up hours of your lives.

And if I get really bored, I will start doing other things to make reverse-engineering my work painful and annoying.

Happy now?
This is exactly why people think you are an 'asshat'.

This and your inabilty to accept the valid criticism from your peers.
Last edited by FLOZi on 11 Jun 2007, 02:24, edited 1 time in total.
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Neddie
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Post by Neddie »

From your peers, not of your peers.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

And, just for the record, I can't make anybody take NanoBlobs out've Spring. It's GPL! Until somebody takes me to court to try and resolve that, I regard it as such, and as such, anybody who adheres to the license can do whatever they want with it. Which was the whole fucking point of the exercise, thank-you-very-much.
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quantum
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Post by quantum »

Argh wrote: I am not sharing any future work on BOS animation. No more code samples, no explanations, no more walkthroughs, and I will not include un-compiled BOS code in the final mod, so that even if you can pretty easily reverse-engineer the resulting scripts, it will still eat up hours of your lives.
Don't, please. I don't care about licenses or forum drama, all I know is that this decision only hurts the nub modders (like me) who are mostly lurkers, and the future modders, who can't post today. Those you hold a grudge against know this stuff or can live without it.

I know you're not an asshat, an so does everyone you've helped.

Why are you wasting your time debating, anyway. This discussion is not going anywhere and I'm sure you'd rather spend your time on your project.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

I don't care about licenses or forum drama, all I know is that this decision only hurts the nub modders (like me) who are mostly lurkers, and the future modders, who can't post today.
Give me choices then, people! Give me a way to offer my work under a license of some sort, that keeps it in public hands, and I will do so. That would satisfy my requirements, since anything that "keeps it in public hands" is going to have to be darn specific, to avoid people trying to pass my work off as their own. That's my final say on this. Further arguments about whether NanoBlobs was licensed properly are just noise, frankly. We're talking about the future, now.
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Felix the Cat
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Post by Felix the Cat »

Argh wrote:Basically, all I am seeing here is more bullshit. Not one of you offered me another license that would resolve this and give me what I require.
KDR_11k wrote:Argh, he's telling you to use the LGPL, prevents hidden distribution just as much (neither GPL nor LGPL affect projects that are never distributed to the public) but explicitely states that only the files licensed under it must remain open source, not the whole work it occurs in and thus doesn't create the ambiguity of whether work refers to the whole mod or just the script.
I haven't personally offered any alternative license because:

1) I am not you and I cannot know exactly how you want your work to be reused by others.

2) The front-runners for licensing seem to be the GPL/LGPL/CC/other similar license, and as I have serious issues with the people who created these licenses (let's just say that they're all a bunch of damn communists and leave it at that), I don't want to endorse these licenses. That is not to say that I don't think you should use them - I just don't want to be connected to them.

3) You have said that you want a license that is "well-tested" on multiple occasions, when in fact the vast majority of software licenses, across the entire spectrum of software development (big and small commercial publishers, self-publishers, non-profits, open-source, and so on) do not meet any standard definition of "well-tested". In fact, most aren't tested at all. A good license is one that doesn't have to be tested in court in order to figure out what it says.

But if you want my suggestion...

Code: Select all

The holder of copyright over this Work, Wolfe Games [or whatever your studio is called], hereby grants you the right to use this work, subject to the following conditions:

1) You may freely modify this Work, as long as any modified versions of this Work are made available under this License;

2) Any work produced by you that includes this Work, either in its original state or modified by you or another, must be made to prominently give credit to Wolfe Games in such a way as the credit is accessible to the end user;

3) Any work produced by you that includes this Work, either in its original state or modified by you or another, must be made to contain a copy of this Work in the form (original or modified) that your work makes use of it, and said copy must prominently include a copy of this License;

4) Nothing in this License shall be read in such a way as to induce a third party to cause any file or work that is not a derivative of this Work to be subject to this License.
Short, simple, includes what you have stated you want to see in a license, but as I just wrote it now, it is not "well-tested".
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

The holder of copyright over this [type of property] (hereby referred to as the "Property"), [name of licensor or studio](hereby referred to as "the Licensor"), hereby grants the Licensee(hereby referred to as "you") a License to use, sell, translate, redistribute and modify this Property, or make this Property part of a larger Work, subject to the following conditions:

**CONDITIONS**

A) Any Work produced by you that includes this Property, must be made to prominently give credit to the Licensor in such a way as the credit is accessible to the end user. Sole discretion of what constitutes "accessible to the end user" is defined by the Licensor;

B) Any Work produced by you that includes this Property, either in its original state or modified by you or any other party, must be made to contain a complete and un-modified copy of this Work in the original, un-modified form and format;

C) Nothing in this License shall be read in such a way as to induce a third party to cause any file or work that is not a derivative of this Work to be subject to this License. This License is not intended to void or alter your property rights over your Work as a whole.

D) If any clause of this License or its Conditions is found to be invalid or void in a Court of Law, all other clauses remain in effect.

E) You may not ever transfer, sell, assign or otherwise assert copyrights or ownership rights of any kind over this Property, nor may you issue this Property, or modified versions of this Property, without this License, or under a new License. This is irregardless of your copyrights and ownership rights to all files within the Work that make no demonstrable use of this Property. You may assign, sell, or transfer the Work as a whole without prejudice, but you may not deny the use of this Property to others, so long as they adhere to the provisions of this License.

F) If you wish to negotiate new terms of this License, it is at the sole discretion of the original Licensor. You may not purchase a modified version of this file and re-license it, nor may any Licensee modify the terms of this License.


Hrmm. At last, we're reaching somewhere useful.

Here's my edit. Are any parts of this unclear or too vague? The important part is a separation between the Work and the Property. As I've said before, I do not want to keep people from using my work, and ideally I want them to be able to keep their original work under copyright. That is the nasty part, frankly. There has to be a clearer way of spelling that out, I think.



And, very last issue... what, exactly, am I to do about the header? At what point would it be considered "original enough" that I am no longer being accused of just copy n' paste? Do I have to rename everything, and put it into an arbitrary order, and rewrite every sentence? Or am I going to have to modify Spring to use a different header structure, before this is a non-issue for everybody? Because whatever happens next, people, I am not going through this again.
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Snipawolf
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Post by Snipawolf »

I read it, seems kinda solid to me..

I think it would work fine.

I'm no expert though, so you probably shouldn't take my word on it.

I agree with quantum however, I would like if you kept everything helpful in your works. I didn't need to consult anything you made, except your FX, but I didn't copy or use any of them.. I just didn't know what did what and had to test some stuff..

Thanks to us having such an amazing wiki on modding, huh?
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Felix the Cat
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Post by Felix the Cat »

The only question I have about the modified license is whether you wanted to compel people who modify your work to publish their modification under your license.

After reading the license I'm not sure whether, if I were to take a licensed script and modify it, under what conditions I would be compelled to release it to the public and in what form it must be released. Perhaps that's something to address.

As to the header - I wouldn't be too worried if I were you. I know I am not you, but if I were I wouldn't even try to enforce a license for a header file.

The header is more or less meaningless without the corresponding script or one closely resembling it. Since the script provided will be licensed, and presumably the only meaningful way to use the header would be with the script, you're already controlling the important & original part.

As long as:
1) the licensed parts are clearly original, and
2) the license does not "infect" anything else,

I don't see anyone actually having a problem with the license.
el_matarife
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Post by el_matarife »

Tobi wrote:Actually, while the Spring license (GPL) would never leak onto mods (since mods are just datafiles for Spring), I'm pretty sure a single mod can be considered a binary and a single work, in which case GPL'ing one file of it effectively means GPL'ing the entire mod, and also means any mod that wants to reuse part of it will either need to be GPL too, or the author will have to ask explicit permission to the original author use a particular piece of content under a different license.
I am unsure as to whether rolling all this stuff up together applies the GPL to everything. It's not necessarily linking, but you're probably right that it could be considered a binary. Once again, let me drag out some analogies. If you use a GPL macro in a document, does the text/data in a document fall under the GPL as well? It’s packed in one possibly binary file, but there’s a separation between the data and the logic I think. In Spring's case, the only stuff that could be considered logic is Lua scripts or maybe some other scripting. TDFs and stuff are probably more data than logic.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

After reading the license I'm not sure whether, if I were to take a licensed script and modify it, under what conditions I would be compelled to release it to the public and in what form it must be released. Perhaps that's something to address.
Basically, what I want, and obviously this needs to be clear, is how this very important scenario plays out:

Joe decides I made a really cool script for controlling human animations. It is using a method that is novel, and Joe thinks that there are compelling reasons why it's better to use than some other method, because they will save him a lot of time and energy coming up with a better method.

Joe makes his game, and he wants to sell it to the public. The GPL allows him to sell Spring, that's not a problem. But what about the scripts that Joe has written, which are heavily based on my work? Obviously, they are probably somewhat different- they may even be much, much cooler than my originals. That's irrelevant, though- what's relevant is that the core script wasn't really Joe's idea- it was mine.

Well, what needs to happen here, before I will release any further work, is that Joe would be compelled to allow other game designers to use Joe's versions of this script, under the same License (i.e., I am still the Licensor, Joe is not).

I.E., Joe has had to include my original script inside his mod, so that it's quite easy to tell what he's done to my script. This adds almost nothing to the size of a mod, so it's not a big obstacle to people using the script. So people interested in Joe's version can now compare the two, and use Joe's version for whatever they want to, so long as my version, and the accompanying License, are always included. Whether Joe wants that to happen, or not!

Joe should be allowed to tell people to keep their hands off of his TDFs, his bitmaps, his models, or whatever else is in his game that is 100% his.

However, if Joe gets caught trying to pass my scripts off as his original ideas, then I should be able to call bullshit, and require him to adhere to the license. Or sue him, if there's money involved.

In short, I want everybody to feel free to use my work. I just don't want people then denying the use of that work, and derivative works based on that work, to everybody else, later down the road. Because while Joe may have, in some important ways, improved upon my work, it's still not his original idea, and original ideas are not exactly common things.

It's a very important concept here- I am trying to encourage people to view sharing of some things that most of us really want to have working right (like, say, good human animation stuff that works correctly all of the time and is fluid and easy to modify) are available to everybody, regardless of who has last improved it. That is a good way to make sure that everybody is helping everybody, while allowing the unique units and other stuff that people develop to remain their property.
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