On Sunday August 1st, at 16:00 UTC the Wesnoth developers met on Internet Relay Chat to discuss their attitudes towards (and possible responses to) the licensing questions raised about sale via Apple's App Store.
Summary: The atmosphere was positive and constructive, and we all gained a better understanding of each others' concerns, but the differences are significant and we are did not reach a conclusion. Proposals will be culled from the logs and posted separately for evaluation and discussions leading to a follow up meeting. Thanks to all who attended and contributed (as always!). Details: Noy chaired and coordinated the flow of topics. We started by asking everyone's motivations for contributing, and a few cherished moments in their personal experience with Wesnoth. The most common motivation was how great the game itself was; at least 9 people mentioned that. Seven people praised the excellent Wesnoth community. Sharing or contributing was mentioned by four people, and Open Source / Freedom was noted by five. 4 indicated they found it fun :) The point was generally agreed that this meeting was about where our boundaries are, and not specifically about Apple; other platforms we are considering present similar issues. Android (with AT&T's apparent removal of the "allow third party apps" button) and PalmOS were specifically mentioned as imminent porting targets. There was a proposal to change the iPhone port from a $5 app to a "pay what you want" model (this is as close to donations as Apple allow), to at least alleviate some of the most obvious access restriction. There was a fair bit of support for this. There was a proposal to make a build available for jailbroken devices, eg. on Cydia. The question was then whether this was pointless if the app was made freely available via Apple anyway. (The legality and ease of jailbreaking was discussed, and the question of whether "voiding the warranty" was real, but we got back on track.) It was proposed that we emphasize the community "world-wide volunteer contributor nature" on the app store and in the game, to grow community and contributors. This seemed fairly uncontentious. It was also proposed that we add an in-game donate (or Pay What You Want) on all platforms, now we have found a use for money. It was noted that a previous donate button on the web site was very little used, however and has been removed Things got a little scattered again, with discussion of the legalities of licensing and violation and compiling apps for a jailbroken phone, Apple's Terms of Service and some wise statements about why it's more important to know firstly what we want before worrying about what the law or licenses say. Two proposals were then raised: that the code always be available, and that a "howto compile" document be kept to ensure that it be as simple as possible to make Wesnoth for such devices (presumbly jailbroken). This was generally well-received as a baseline requirement, at least. In the context of potential loss of users, it was noted that although an estimated 10% of the userbase were on these devices, most of them likely have another supported platform: one popular recent feature is the ability to transfer saved games to Windows/MacOS. Ad-hoc version releases were discussed (limited to 50 users and 100 versions per $99 developer license), but generally dismissed in favor of jailbreaking as a preferred non-AppStore distribution method for people to contribute and modify their code. A suggestion was made that even within the closed system, the app itself could be made more hackable, particularly the WML which describes scenarios. Some developers didn't know that currently even this modification is not possible. There was little followup discussion on this point, but what there was was supportive. (Discussion wandered again into the exact details of jailbreaking, warranty and non-AppStore apps and developer licenses.) It was proposed that a second license be crafted for Apple's AppStore (and possibly other platforms). It was proposed that the GPL remain, and we provide an alternate version for jailbroken phones with easy to find instructions on wesnoth.org on how to jailbreak/install, and we set up a 'pay what you want' system for all platforms with a competent presentation (i.e. Humble Indie Bundle-style). It was proposed that "if you sell on a closed deviced, you must share your revenues (X%) w/ Wesnoth", for some definition of closed. No comments on this proposal It was proposed (again) that we should make license-questionable platforms less attractive than fully compliant ones. There was some support, but concerns about "punishing users on their device choice", and unanswered questions about how exactly it would be done, such as a one-version delay for the app store. Towards the end it was proposed that on non-jailbroken phones, Apple takes 30% of your gold at the end of every scenario :) That helped close out the discussion. It was agreed that we would meet again. Attendance (those who spoke during the meeting, thus appeared in my logs): alink cjhopman_ eleazar_ freim grzywacz ilor Ivanovic KylePoole mordante noy Noyga rusty shadowmaster silene Sirp timotei YogiHH zookeeper Late arrivals: boucman gabba Sapient _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
