The legality of charging money for a source port?

[AnotherGrunt]

Ok, then it is pretty clear. I don't get that license mess but if Zandronum was released under non-commercial license, there is nothing to speak about. It shoud only be made clear in corresponding license file.

[beanz]

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding of the GPL means that you are free to sell it as long as source code changes are made public. There is the question about how far you'd have to derive something in order to be able to re-license it as you please. I'm sure there are some points made about it in the license but I'm too lazy to actually read through all of it.

 

[ketmar]

4 hours ago, beanz said:

There is the question about how far you'd have to derive something in order to be able to re-license it as you please.

there are no questions: you can't. unless you rewrite the whole code from scratch. and technically you still can be sued, because you've *seen* GPL code, and inevitably used its ideas. simply retyping GPLed code from scratch won't work, its still the same code.

 

that's why, btw, we, GPL-addicts, want the whole world to become GPL. otherwise we can't even read alot of interesting code -- to play safe and avoid license conflicts.

[beanz]

6 hours ago, ketmar said:

there are no questions: you can't. unless you rewrite the whole code from scratch. and technically you still can be sued, because you've *seen* GPL code, and inevitably used its ideas. simply retyping GPLed code from scratch won't work, its still the same code

That seems a bit totalitarian. Are there any court cases regarding this?

[ketmar]

2 hours ago, beanz said:

That seems a bit totalitarian.

this is how it works according to the law. that's why, for example, Wine developers will never look into leaked windows sources. that's why i will never look how something is done in non-GPL engines. the chances of getting a lawsuit are low, but technically it is possible. and i definitely don't have enough money to spend them on lawyers.

 

the thing is that it works for the other side too: technically, if you have enough money, you can sue proprietary dev for looking into GPL code, because it is really hard to prove that they never used some ideas from it.

 

copyright laws sux.

[dpJudas]

This isn't true. Copyright doesn't mean you can't copy an idea. That's called a patent and is an entirely different thing. Copyright means you can't take the original implementation of an idea and duplicate it or create derivatives of it.

 

The reason wine developers won't look at the Windows source code is simply that, if they have looked at it, it becomes more difficult in court to state the source code ended up pretty similar by coincidence. This is particular important when we are talking about reimplementing an API where there's only so many ways you can code something.

[beanz]

58 minutes ago, ketmar said:

because it is really hard to prove that they never used some ideas from it. 

You can't claim copyright on an idea. That's more of a patent thing than anything, which requires you to actually go out and acquire a patent from the government.

[jval]

10 hours ago, ketmar said:

simply retyping GPLed code from scratch won't work, its still the same code. 

 

What about re-writing the code in another programming language, eg take the C Doom  linux source code and re-write it in Pascal? Is it still the same code?

[Edward850]

5 minutes ago, jval said:

 

What about re-writing the code in another programming language, eg take the C Doom  linux source code and re-write it in Pascal? Is it still the same code?

Yes, which is why disassembly doesn't magically escape the same licensing given that's a conversion from machine code. The only way you can escape from the original license of a particular code is if you either A) Get permission from the authors of that code or B) cleanroom rewrite it, where one team documents the behaviour of a system, and another team, never having seen the original implementation at all, implements that specification from scratch.

[ketmar]

1 hour ago, jval said:

What about re-writing the code in another programming language, eg take the C Doom  linux source code and re-write it in Pascal? Is it still the same code?

yep. neither machine, nor manual translation strips off the license. that's why it is so hard (if possible at all) to prove that you haven't used other people's code -- some parts will inevitably look almost the same, and there is no way to tell if you learned the algorithm from other code and "manually rewrote" it, or devised the algorithm independently (and code similarity is accidental). so explicitly avoiding to look into "problematic" code is the only safe choice here.

 

@dpJudas that's what i meant, yeah. bad wording on my side.

[jval]

I have another question: Assume there is a GPL source and a derived product that uses a closed source proprietary DLL. The DLL is free for non commercial use. The derived product  is open source and under GPL, but re-selling it requires a fee for the DLL distribution. Is this a valid situation? Or the portion of the DLL access code must be in the same license with the DLL (i.e. free for non commercial use) and the other parts of the program remain GPL?

[Edward850]

5 minutes ago, jval said:

I have another question: Assume there is a GPL source and a derived product that uses a closed source proprietary DLL. The DLL is free for non commercial use. The derived product  is open source and under GPL, but re-selling it requires a fee for the DLL distribution. Is this a valid situation? Or the portion of the DLL access code must be in the same license with the DLL (i.e. free for non commercial use) and the other parts of the program remain GPL?

It depends. Said DLL is definably incompatible with the GPL license as is, so that in itself is a no-go. GPL only stops at something controlled by the operating system it runs in (outside of some weird strong armed exceptions inside the Linux Kernel which causes problems for the Nvidia Optimus GPU switching). If a library can't be defined as integral to the operating system itself (i.e something that would always have existed for the operating system to work, regardless of if your program did or didn't exist), it's not granted a linking exception.

[ketmar]

58 minutes ago, jval said:

I have another question: Assume there is a GPL source and a derived product that uses a closed source proprietary DLL. The DLL is free for non commercial use. The derived product  is open source and under GPL

this is possible only if library headers are using a GPL-compatible license (otherwise headers' license will conflict with GPL). but generally speaking, mixing licenses is a very dangerous move -- it's hard to tell if you can do that even if you're a copyright lawer yourself. ;-) you will need to ask real lawyers here, providing them with both licenses (and they will prolly tell you "don't!" anyway ;-).

[mxrgan]

I am just coming here from your new video and the discussion has become pretty slow as of now but I wanted to put in my thoughts. It all depends on the license that Zandronum uses. I am not the expert on copyright law but have studied a small bit about the copyright laws and even have released a few commercially usable assets and from that small experience I do know that if you know the license of a certain item and a fork of derivative of that item is violating the terms of that item's license, it is illegal, making it a big no no. You just have to know Zandronum's license and then compare it to what the fork is doing, and then decide if it is illegal.

But I can say that you SHOULDNT AT ALL make any doom content hide behind a pricetag (Speaking from an opiniated moral view) as it goes against the main goal of the Doom Modding community, which is to make free content to make doom more fun. But it technically is possible depending on the license used for different things. That is my two cents.

[Super Benellus]

no one likes this guy in the russian community, if they do they are either his friends or some newbies that only play brutal doom, he always said that his mod is superior than ClusterFuck when in reality it was almost the same thing(even worse), when someone had a problem that involved gzdoom or zandronum he would always use that as a praise to his own source port, he is making a blacklist for mods that u have to pay for in order to use on his port(or whitelist which is worse) so maybe thats illegal towards those who made the mod

[ketmar]

3 hours ago, Super Benellus said:

so maybe thats illegal towards those who made the mod

it absolutely doesn't matter, because his sourceport is a pipe dream. i doubt that he is able to simply recompile GZDoom or Zandronum, and i am pretty sure that he cannot code even to save his own life.