> Just to make sure, what is the main reason for this? There is an old forum thread where people expressed their concerns: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?t=21082 There are others but that is probably one of the most significant.
So I will say, I think I agree with you a bit, in that I don't think the "GPL is obviously bad for art". The GPL has a lot going for it: 1.) It's easier to read the fine print of the GPLv2 license for instance than to read the fine print of CC-BY-SA 3.0, in my opinion, and that's probably what you should responsibly do rather than only read the CC "executive summaries". 2.) The GPL is known to be compatible with a wide range of licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses The CC licenses by contrast aren't really compatible with anything else: http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses But ultimately, the CC licenses have been overwhelmingly adopted by artists, by wikipedia et al., by more or less everyone. The GPL art creates a lot of uncertainty because 1.) It seems there is no consensus on how the "preferred modifiable form" language applies to music, sprites and portraits. Most projects seem not to try to force artists to release their project files just because the final content is listed GPL. We have a README statement in our repo explaining that we feel that the .png and .ogg files are a preferred modifiable form. But the prospect of possibly being forced to do this is not acceptable to the artists. And there are many forum posts by outsiders and developers expressing fear that that might legally be what the GPL requires. It's pretty hard to guarantee that no court will ever interpret it that way, and if it happened I guess we would have a hot mess, because we generally don't have the project files anymore. 2.) If you think that it indeed does make sense to GPL art even if the source code requirement is vacuous, then presumably that's because you think that GPL art can "infect" other art (or code?) in our project or in a different project -- otherwise what does GPL'ing it accomplish that putting it under CC-0 or similar doesn't. But we seem to have a consensus that that cannot happen in a game, or at least that it doesn't happen in games that are similar wesnoth. So it's not clear what is achieved by GPL'ing our art. Ultimately, there's very little achieved by having "clever" licensing that's different from other projects, other than confusing people and creating intractable legal situations. The forum thread indicated was apparently seven years ago... and since then most games seem to have converged on "GPL the code, CC-BY-SA the art". So why not just get with the times? Best Regards, Chris Beck On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Paul Ebermann <paul-eberm...@gmx.de> wrote: > Martin Proud wrote: > > As far as music goes, this change is most welcome! > > > > Having been a long-time lurker in the Music sub-forum, I know music > > submissions using the GPL requirement was a point of major frustration > > that, in turn, I believe played a significant part in turning away some > > of our best music contributors. > > Just to make sure, what is the main reason for this? > > Is this > (a) because of the "anyone can change it and release the changed version > again" (as long as the result is still licensed with the same license) > allowance, or > (b) because of the "one needs to provide sources" requirement, or > (c) for some other reason? > > Point (a) would still apply for CC-BY-SA – it is a > derived-works-allowed-with-copyleft license just like GPL, just made > specifically for content instead of code (so Point (b) doesn't apply > anymore). > > If you want "everyone can use this, but not make changed versions", then > "CC-BY-ND" (no derived works) would be a better license, but this is not > what Dave is proposing (and I guess it might not be suitable for a > project like Wesnoth). > > > Paul (not an artist) > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wesnoth-dev mailing list > Wesnoth-dev@gna.org > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev > >
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