It's great to finally see someone take the initiative in this regard, since I
was just about to figure out the best way to propose this to the mailing list.
As a mainline and add-on art contributor myself, I wouldn't have a problem
with using the CC BY-SA 4.0 license for my existing and future art.
However, there are a few points that need to be addressed before moving
forward with this:
1. What does this mean for the add-ons server? Which mainline development
branches and add-on instances will be affected?
Will the add-ons server continue to stick to the current everything-is-GPL
model, or are we going to request user-made content creators to use CC BY-SA
for art and music and the GNU GPL for code as well? Which add-ons servers will
be affected by this change, considering that the 1.12 instance was relatively
recently started and we expect to support Wesnoth 1.12 for two to four years
from this point on?
It's also important to note that although it may be feasible to ask
contributors to relicense our *current* mainline assets (for which branches?
1.12 and master or master only?), it may be significantly harder for us to
deal with art from e.g. Wesnoth 1.0 that might still be redistributed in the
add-ons server in some form (unmodified or otherwise).
Should GNU GPL art and music still be allowed in the add-ons server? What
about mainline? Can we make an exception for cases where we were unable to
contact the copyright holders after a certain amount of time?
Also, should other CC licenses (say, the non-commercial variants) be allowed
for content in the add-ons server? I believe the reason we use the GNU GPL for
add-on content is mostly to ease mainlining add-ons, but whether this is a
valid concern nowadays is debatable (1.9.0 was pretty much the last version to
promote UMC to mainline, not counting the Khalifate faction). Should other
non-CC licenses be allowed as well?
Do note as well that we will need to educate add-on creators on the matter
somehow. For many of them, switching licenses is not *supposed* to be as
simple as replacing a label on a file, but they might actually do so and call
it a day and potentially infringe on someone's copyright by wrongly
relicensing GPL-only content.
Finally, as the add-ons server admin and only active campaignd maintainer,
what infrastructure and code changes should I be expected to make in response
to this? Currently, the add-ons server asks people to agree to license their
whole add-on under the GNU GPL upon upload [1]. What would be the best wording
to reflect the new policy? What should we do about campaignd auto-injecting a
single COPYING file [2] to add-ons missing one?
1:
https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/blob/master/src/campaign_server/campaign_server.cpp#L553
2:
https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/blob/master/src/campaign_server/addon_utils.cpp#L107
2. What about copyright?
I tried to get a discussion going on about our messy and impractical copyright
policy (or lack thereof) back in December, and people generally seemed to
agree that as things stand right now, we are exposing ourselves to DMCA abuse
on potential future platforms such as Steam. My proposal was simply to require
contributors (of any kind) to assign copyright on their contributions to
either the Battle for Wesnoth Project, or Wesnoth Inc -- the second may have
better legal standing in court. (For that matter, does Wesnoth Inc have a
lawyer?) Optionally (and preferably), contributors should retain all rights to
their work but may not revoke our ability to do so as well.
Right now, tracking down copyright information for our art (but thankfully not
music) is pretty much an impossible task for outsiders because authorship of a
given file is usually only traceable through Git commit history, and even that
fails from time to time, making the whole endeavor unnecessarily complicated
and requiring additional research of e.g. forum posts and IRC logs. If we are
going to switch our licensing model, we might as well go the whole way and
deal with this long-standing issue now, especially if we hope to submit
Wesnoth to Steam Greenlight some day.
I hope to have covered all potential concerns in this mail, but if I missed
anything I'd like people to speak up NOW rather than wait several months to
give an opinion.
--
Regards
Ignacio R. Morelle <shadowm>
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