Re: [Flightgear-devel] Content protection for modders?
Hello all, i see the intention behind protecting models has been misunderstood. Lets clarify the issues: the modellers asked me to provide secured file format to prevent model theft and resell for benefit. They are willing to contribute to FG and don't plan to sell add-ons. Instead they would like to see their copyright enforced and not abused by others. AFAIK open source licenses in generall are about the programs and their code, not the conent people create with this software. I bet noone would ask companies using open office to disclose their documents or excel sheets ;). I also notice that MSFS enjoys greater attention by add-on creators. As for the protection realization: i think of an OSG format plugin supporting common OSG plugin conventions. The code won't be disclosed and only shipped in compiled form for dynamic linking against. 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?
On 28.08.2011 16:43, Paul Guhl wrote: Lets clarify the issues: the modellers asked me to provide secured file format to prevent model theft and resell for benefit. They are willing to contribute to FG and don't plan to sell add-ons. Instead they would like to see their copyright enforced and not abused by others. AFAIK open source licenses in generall are about the programs and their code, not the conent people create with this software. You are wrong here. It's about the project as a whole. Our intention is to create a _free_ flight simulator. And a flight simulator only makes sense as a whole: you need the core program, you need scenery, you need aircraft and documentation. Without the aircraft or scenery or documentation, the core would be useless. Same vice versa. FlightGear lives as a free project because we have many people contributing under the same free license terms. Some contribute C++ code, others aircraft animations, others aircraft models - and some work on the Wiki/documentation. It's great that way. No one would volunteer to work on the _GPLed_ core, if all (or the majority) of the other parts (be it aircraft or scenery) weren't free too. Why should we? We could just use MSFS or xplane, or create addons for these, if we wanted a closed source / non-GPLed / unfree flight simulator. I bet noone would ask companies using open office to disclose their documents or excel sheets Bad comparison. Open office is only usable since _all_ of it is free and GPLed - the core and the GUI. Aircraft are very much the GUI frontend of a flight simulator. Without aircraft models, the FlightGear core was dead and useless. We cannot force anyone to publish their own work under the GPL (at least when they really created everything from scratch, without reusing any part of another GPLed aircraft/source/...). So, yes, you can create closed/unfree aircraft - it's your decision (and btw, unlike excel sheets, aircraft are created by XML/text editors and 3D modelling software - so you don't even create aircraft _with_ FG itself). But you can't expect to receive active support by those working on free/GPLed parts - just so that others can keep their work closed. The FG project wouldn't work if the majority of people working on different areas were providing closed parts - or were using different licenses. ;). I also notice that MSFS enjoys greater attention by add-on creators. I agree, and I think that's fine and hopefully it stays that way. I don't mind anyone creating payware/closed source add-ons. MSFS or xplane are great for that purpose. But why would we want payware/close source stuff for FG? That would mainly harm the project. The only reason to work on FG is, that everything is free/modifiable/adaptable to one's own needs. As for the protection realization: i think of an OSG format plugin supporting common OSG plugin conventions. The code won't be disclosed and only shipped in compiled form for dynamic linking against. That sounds really great. You're probably thinking about Windows binaries. Well, maybe Mac binaries. Too much hassle to provide matching libraries for the huge variety of Linux distros... Great. Well, you could create such a library - just don't expect much support from FG developers. But before you start: remember the concept doesn't make much sense. Once the model file is read by the OSG plugin, the entire data is decrypted and stays in memory. It's almost trivial to write a converter which uses the close-source secret OSG plugin and reads the encrypted file into the OSG scene graph. Then the tool can just traverse the scene graph and write the entire data (still unencrypted, of course) to a file (say to an .osg file with .png or .dds textures). So, it's trivial to convert the encrypted file into an unencrypted format, if you provide the decryption plugin. No one needs the plugin's source for that. And I could see people doing so, so models can be modified for local/personal purposes (which is the main reason for FG, don't forget). Of course, that wouldn't change the models' license. So eventually the license (and _only_ the license) protects. So, all the effort wouldn't give you any advantage (well, ok, maybe you could ask money for the plugin - then it could make a certain difference... ;-) ). So, to put it short: no, I don't think there was any misunderstanding :). cheers, Thorsten -- 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 Sunday, August 28, 2011 07:43:47 AM Paul Guhl wrote: Hello all, i see the intention behind protecting models has been misunderstood. Lets clarify the issues: the modellers asked me to provide secured file format to prevent model theft and resell for benefit. They are willing to contribute to FG and don't plan to sell add-ons. Instead they would like to see their copyright enforced and not abused by others. AFAIK open source licenses in generall are about the programs and their code, not the conent people create with this software. I bet noone would ask companies using open office to disclose their documents or excel sheets ;). I also notice that MSFS enjoys greater attention by add-on creators. As for the protection realization: i think of an OSG format plugin supporting common OSG plugin conventions. The code won't be disclosed and only shipped in compiled form for dynamic linking against. Best Regards Paul If you don't want your stuff to be open source then don't use an open source license. But that means that you will have to maintain your own repository(s) and download facilities. It is also possible to dual license things such as having an open source license for non-commerical uses and a restriced fee based license for commercial uses. Again I think this would prevent it from bing hosted by FlightGear. Also if you could use an obscured file format then your stuff is NOT open source no matter what else you do. Security through obscurity never works and it surprises me that anyone thinks that it will but it appears that many do believe this. On the other hand if you license your stuff so that only certain uses are allowed any use outside of those that are allowed gives you the right to take legal action to prevent the missuse of your content. This has nothing to do with the format of the content (IE. readable or obscured). The reason that MSFS has an active commerical addon community is because of the profit motive. IE. these folks are doing it because they expect to make money and I don't think this has much if anything to do with the model file format. On the other hand no one is expecting to make a profit doing FG add ons. In addition, in FG much of the model are things beyond the 3D model. Althought the 3D model is important and a lot of work the bigger picture is that there is a huge amount of work involved in creating high quality FDMs and in doing things like animating the model and creating realistic systems (for example havng a realistic startup procedure). These non-3D parts of a model are at least as much work as doing the comparible quality 3D model part if not more. Of course this depends on the complexity of the aircraft being modeled and in some very simple aircraft the 3D model may be the single largest part of the effort but in complex aircraft it is not. All of the non-3D parts are in plain text (XML) and there is no way to obscure these without rewriting significant parts of FlightGear. On the other hand I would like to see some additional 3D formats supported. But not because I want to hide my content but because of the extra functionality. For example with the OSG or Blender formats we would have the potential to use bones in our models and this would allow for additional animation flexibility. This would be very useful for animating things like pilots or wing warping (Wright flier). Hal -- 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?
Le 28/08/2011 16:43, Paul Guhl a écrit : Lets clarify the issues: the modellers asked me to provide secured file format to prevent model theft and resell for benefit. They are willing to contribute to FG and don't plan to sell add-ons. Instead they would like to see their copyright enforced and not abused by others. Hi Paul, There is also something that has to be noted about GPL licensing, this is the fire and forget principle. In other words, a kind of healthy simplicity that prevent some of us about what would be done after our work is released. I do work hours and hours on my models, putting in the best that I can do. It's just for the pleasure to do a nice job and to know that it is a real and useful part of a whole, a real and solid software. Now I don't want to care of the rest. At work I care about the money I'll take for my work. I'll care about sharing part of my knowledge but I work on keeping the advantages my company has by knowing how to solve some problems better than the others. I care if an other company steal our customers while copying our brand and our marketing. I'm very honest in my office work but it's a business and I sell my work. Here, I enjoy giving my work. Giving it as a gift, for free, no matter what happens after. I give an aircraft to every one, I don't care if a few will spoil the gift. That their problem, I just don't want to have something to do else than doing the model and give it. That my pleasure. If I also have to protect it, further than publishing it under GPL, the game change and I will start to care about things which are not pleasant and then I'd prefer to be paid for that. Those property or copyright problems are not welcome in my simple little brain ! That's my conception of one of the coolest thing in GPL. There is only one thing not really pleasant for me that I accept with/for GPL, it's the work I could spend protecting the GPL spitit. My 2 cents, Alexis -- 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
