2008/9/17 Arc Riley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > There is absolutely no issue licensing game data under the (L/A)GPL. In > fact, this is required for at least the GPLv3 in that the license applies to > the "whole of the work, and all it's parts, regardless of how they are > packaged". Thus if the game code or any dependencies (ie, the engine) are > licensed under the GPL, the data must be licensed under a GPL compatible > license (which the CC licenses are not). > > After numerous conversations with copyright lawyers on the specific subject > of games, the entire game is one copyrighted work.
This might be really relevant for us, the Games Team, as there seem to be quite a lot of games that have a different license for the engine and the game data, and the combination of GPL and CC-by-sa seems to be getting more and more popular. According to what you're saying, if we consider the entire game as one copyrighted work, that might make some games simply not distributable. On the other hand, for some games (and theoretically for most of them), the same game engine can be used with different data, and some times vice-versa. If this is the case, the situation might be similar to a media player and media data, or to a word processor and the document. The game engine can be seen as the program, and the game data as the document it applies too. We've had this discussion on how to consider the relationship between games and game data for some time, and in fact it might have relevant consequences such as the game being in contrib or main for some games depending on how we consider it and, if GPL is to be understood as that, might make some games impossible to distribute. It might probably depend on every case, and whether different sets of data really exist, or at least could be created. I'm really interested on the different point of view that might exist about this matter. I'm CC'ing the message to the Games Team, as the thread might be important for us. Greetings, Miry -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
