[Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
Hello everybody, not sure if this discussion arose before... From what i have seen so far, all usable 3d formats for aircraft/building models are either ASCII text or reversible/convertible formats. Mod developers told me, that they would wish close format for 3d models which would prevent reverse engineering of the content they create for free. I feel it is a legitim wish and would invite more modelers to join the FlightGear project. Is it legal to provide closed source plug-in to FlightGear (more exact OSG file reader plug-in). The only need to keep code close is the prevention of reverse engineering. Thoughts, suggestions? Best Regards Paul -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
Sorry, but closing the content would be against the spirit of a GPL project. Also, reverse engineering to allow interoperability of formats is expressely allowed in the DMCA. The content is protected by copyright law, that ought to be enough. If plane developers are interested in creating content for money by closing down the model format with drm measures they will have to go the whole length and make their own flight simulator to run them on. But artificial scarcity is destined to fail in an economy where content can be duplicated. Btw, there's no actual way you can close completely a format, eventually it would be possible to rip it, even from the graphic card memory. Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:44:57 +0200 From: ad...@simtechnologies.de To: flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders? Hello everybody, not sure if this discussion arose before... From what i have seen so far, all usable 3d formats for aircraft/building models are either ASCII text or reversible/convertible formats. Mod developers told me, that they would wish close format for 3d models which would prevent reverse engineering of the content they create for free. I feel it is a legitim wish and would invite more modelers to join the FlightGear project. Is it legal to provide closed source plug-in to FlightGear (more exact OSG file reader plug-in). The only need to keep code close is the prevention of reverse engineering. Thoughts, suggestions? Best Regards Paul -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
+++ TDO_Brandano - [25/08/11 10:07 +]: Btw, there's no actual way you can close completely a format, eventually it would be possible to rip it, even from the graphic card memory. You wouldn't even need to do that - how can you have a closed format when the code for reading it would need to be open source? I'm still not sure if this is a genuine misunderstanding of what we're trying to do here, or if we've acquired ourselves a new troll. -- Jon Stockill li...@stockill.net -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
2011/8/25 li...@stockill.net: You wouldn't even need to do that - how can you have a closed format when the code for reading it would need to be open source? An encrypted file? The whole idea certainly seems contradictory to the spirit of the project. /JanM -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Simgear - netinfo/in.h not availablefor windows
James With the latest I get link errors looking for freeaddrinf and getaddrinfo. It is cured when I add Wsiapi.h to raw_socket.cxx. i.e. #if defined(WINSOCK) # include winsock2.h # include ws2tcpip.h # include Wspiapi.h # include stdarg.h #else The platform is Windows7, Visual studio 8. I understand that MS had fixed this particular bug back in Windows 2000 days, but it seems to have crept back in – on my system at least. Alan From: James Turner Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 10:36 AM To: FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Simgear - netinfo/in.h not availablefor windows On 22 Aug 2011, at 10:28, Alan Teeder wrote: Thanks for the fix. That was quick ! But not sufficient - I've reverted the whole set of changes until I have a chance to go over them again, since everything seems to have broken. Bah. James -- uberSVN's rich system and user administration capabilities and model configuration take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. Learn more about uberSVN and get a free download at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/wandisco-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Jan Mattsson jan...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/8/25 li...@stockill.net: You wouldn't even need to do that - how can you have a closed format when the code for reading it would need to be open source? An encrypted file? The whole idea certainly seems contradictory to the spirit of the project. Do other sims offer content encryption or content protection? For instance, I've been able to locate and test a blender plugin that can open up many MSFS aircraft models. How about xplane? It's been a *long* *long* time since I fiddled with their package, but at the time I was paying attention, all their 3d formats were open and well defined. Often the commercial sims will store things in their own binary formats, but in most cases these aren't encrypted and the end users figure these out pretty quickly -- so they can either edit the content or create new content with the same format. I wouldn't consider a binary format much of a content protection scheme ... especially in an open source project where the source to load and store the binary format is readily available. I understand the desire for content creators to not get ripped off. But also understand that one of the main reasons that FlightGear can be successful is because we make all the source code and content open. If we didn't make everything open, then we wouldn't get nearly the same amount of volunteer contributions and high quality volunteer contributions is the critical reason why FlightGear has been so successful. If we were a closed off commercial outfit, who would want to pitch in and help someone else make money? But with everything open, you know that your contributions can be enjoyed equally by everyone else, just as much as you are enjoying everyone else's contributions. There are some low-lifes out there that try to make a profit on other people's work, and will gladly lie and misrepresent things to swindle as much money as possible from unsuspecting end users. But the truth is that these people have always existed, and will always exist. They are remarkably good and persistent at copying things ... going so far as to break copy protection schemes, reverse engineer hardware designs, copy the exact look of products (even including the logo.) This isn't a problem that is unique to the FlightGear project -- and it's something we would still face no matter how hard we worked to create copy protection schemes. If you designed a binary content format, someone will reverse engineer it. If you design an encryption scheme, someone will just modify the sim code to dump out the decrypted version after it's been loaded into memory by the proprietary decrypting plugin. (If not outright break the encryption scheme or steal your encryption keys.) In all these case, the content can still be easily copied, replicated, sold, etc. The best scheme I've seen is something that has a node-lock key that will only run on a single PC (key'd to mac address, or processor id.) But this implies a more complicated 2 step install where the user must come back to you after installing the product, report their unique id, get a key, and then install that key before they are able to run. And the problem with all of this is that in an open source project, someone could simply compile a new version of the simulator that skips the key check or accepts a trivial key, or any key. I'm just thinking down various avenues here, but hopefully you can see that what seems like a simple request at first is actually quite complex and creates all kinds of down stream issues (both technically and with user support.) And at the end of the day, the bad guys can usually find work arounds anyway and aren't slowed down too much. When farmers grow crops, they have to put up with weeds. We can try reasonable things to minimize the weeds, but if you are too aggressive at killing the weeds and don't tolerate a single one, then you most likely end up killing much of your crop too. So it's my view that this is something we just have to put up with. We can try to take reasonable steps to minimize the problem, but we can't eliminate all the bad guys without harming all the good things about our project. Curt. -- Curtis Olson: http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/ http://www.flightgear.org - http://gallinazo.flightgear.org -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Simgear - netinfo/in.h not availablefor windows
On 25 Aug 2011, at 15:21, Alan Teeder wrote: I understand that MS had fixed this particular bug back in Windows 2000 days, but it seems to have crept back in – on my system at least. Should be fixed (in a different way) by an imminent FG commit. James -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Simgear - netinfo/in.h notavailablefor windows
Well, that fixed the compilation, but at run time I see: mismatch in socket address sizes Error: connect() failed in make-client_socket() SG_IO_OUT socket creation failed Error opening channel communication layer. I/O Channel config failed. Alan From: Alan Teeder Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2011 3:21 PM To: FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Simgear - netinfo/in.h notavailablefor windows James With the latest I get link errors looking for freeaddrinf and getaddrinfo. It is cured when I add Wsiapi.h to raw_socket.cxx. i.e. #if defined(WINSOCK) # include winsock2.h # include ws2tcpip.h # include Wspiapi.h # include stdarg.h #else The platform is Windows7, Visual studio 8. I understand that MS had fixed this particular bug back in Windows 2000 days, but it seems to have crept back in – on my system at least. Alan -- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
