Mattias: I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say with the proverbial grain of salt.
The thing about being an artist or musician for a GPL project is that the "source" files, for either music or art, are generally _absurd to try and ship with the binary, due to various physical limitations. The average photoshop file for a single piece of larger art (such as a portrait, or story image), can measure in the hundreds of megabytes alone. For one image. I'm not especially familiar with music- creation software, but I get the feeling that source files for a song can really mushroom in size as well (if they're anything like source files for video). Actually including them would mushroom the size of our binaries well into the gigabyte range. The cop-out, of course, is that, at least for visual art, there isn't much use to having the source files. Paintovers can be done at the final resolution of a larger image, and for sprites, it's often easier to start with the final sprite. (Over time, I've found the number of layers in my PSD sprite images steadily decreasing). About the only major use I could see, would be to provide things at a higher resolution. To a certain degree, I do try to bundle "source files" that would be useful to people - there are PNGs of the highest clean resolution (e.g. the one that doesn't give away artifacts of the process I used to create the image) for the program icons for the game in the repository. For music files, it's a very dependent question. I preface this by saying that IANAM (acryonym: "I am not a musician"), but it seems to me that music, unlike visual art, has not settled on a single, standard, software suite; where there is one photoshop for graphics, there seem to be several contenders for the equivalent position in music. Furthermore, any given song generally has dependencies on a set of synthesizers, effects, and other "things" (sometimes including hardware devices) in the musicians setup - without which the same sound cannot be reproduced. These generally are commercial products, and given the way musicians retain bits of software, are often no longer for sale from the original company. So although in theory, a person could make great use of source files to edit the actual tune, and to work collaboratively on a piece, I get the impression that most software setups tend to preclude that. It's kind of a shame, too - the things that could be done if music software and related components were far more standardized, and easily found, would be amazing. So to answer your question; in music and art, the final supplied files are treated as the "source" files as far as the GPL is concerned. If people ask for other files, it might be _polite to provide them, but you're not under any legal obligation to do so. On Apr 13, 2007, at 2:32 PM, Mattias Westlund wrote: > Being a musician, this discussion raises an interesting question. Does > the exact same rules apply for music as for software? If music is > GPL'd, > can someone request that the "source" (whatever that may be) is made > available so that they may change it and release it? I.e. could > someone > contact me and ask me for the raw wave files or even the cubase > project > files, so that s/he may edit them and use them elsewhere? That's a > thought I'm not wholly comfortable with. > > /West > > Bruno Wolff III wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 20:03:10 +0200, >> Martin Renold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 01:03:57PM +0200, David Philippi wrote: >>>> Well, I see nothing that prevents a GPL game from including >>>> music which isn't >>>> under GPL. >>> The GPL requires the modified work "as a whole" to be GPL. Non- >>> GPL music >>> would at least have to be distributed as a separate project. >> >> Now I have a better idea at what David was trying to point out. I >> still >> think music that isn't licensed with some gpl compatible license >> couldn't >> be distributed as a subpart of a gpl whole. Though it would >> certainly be >> possible to distribute non-gpl addons for Wesnoth if someone >> wanted to do it. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wesnoth-dev mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev >> > > _______________________________________________ > Wesnoth-dev mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
