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Catoptromancy

UPTEMPL.TXT Licenses

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After a thread over at Freedoom forums I realized how legally vague the UPTEMPL.TXT copyright permissions are.

Just throwing out ideas about the situation. I think many people might like to use a real license. Some rewritten wad licenses are basically GPL, CC or BSD, but are worded vaguely enough to mean nothing legally.

I suggest something like a Doom Wad Restricted license, and Doom Wad Permissive License be used in UPTEMPL, as well as GPL, CC, BSD, or other.

UPTEMPL.TXT would have a much more legally defined license.

Examples of short uses of GPL for wad licensing.
http://doomsday.generalarcade.com/txt/Loh.txt
http://doomsday.generalarcade.com/txt/tekbrik.txt

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It doesn't really make sense to use GPL since there's no source code to keep open... Go with something short and sweet, where the license text can actually be embedded in the template without taking up more than a page.

BSD would work great for this, as would WTFPL (the entire license is just one sentence!)

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hex11 said:

It doesn't really make sense to use GPL since there's no source code to keep open... Go with something short and sweet, where the license text can actually be embedded in the template without taking up more than a page.

* Copyright / Permissions *

These levels are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL):
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
BSD and other real licenses could be just as short. Open source does not really matter but it does attach the other GPL permissions easily.

I used this one in my wad, short and to the point and legally recognized. Though I think it could be slightly extended for clarity. Very quick summary of permissions along with direct license requirement for legal purpose.
* Copyright / Permissions *

Do whatever you want, give me credit. 
Freedoom Modified BSD licensed. 

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I don't know about the idea of just giving a license name and URL. For some reason, every single file in the OpenBSD source tree (and probably other BSD's too) has the full license text at the top, in a comment or header section. And programs distributed under GPL usually have the actual license text attached as a plain text file in the tarball or zip file.

Maybe it's not strictly necessary, maybe it's just done that way out of tradition or habit, or maybe they do it that way for CYA reasons (so there's nothing left open to question or doubt).

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Here's another source of interpretation to one's advantage:

Authors may NOT use the contents of this file as a base for modification or
reuse.  Permissions have been obtained from original authors for any of
their resources modified or included in this file.

You MAY distribute this file, provided you include this text file, with no
modifications.  You may distribute this file in any electronic format (BBS,
Diskette, CD, etc) as long as you include this file intact.  I have
received permission from the original authors of any modified or included
content in this file to allow further distribution.
It's very minor, but it has been jokingly brought up during an argument on Doomworld. Notice how "this file" tag refers ambiguously to the content file or the text file.

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Catoptromancy said:

* Copyright / Permissions *

Do whatever you want, give me credit. 
Freedoom Modified BSD licensed. 

Please don't do this; if you want to use the BSD license, include the text of the BSD license.

A statement like this is pretty much meaningless - I doubt "do whatever you want" has any legal meaning, and "Freedoom Modified BSD licensed" could be considered ambiguous in several ways.

hex11 said:

I don't know about the idea of just giving a license name and URL. For some reason, every single file in the OpenBSD source tree (and probably other BSD's too) has the full license text at the top, in a comment or header section. And programs distributed under GPL usually have the actual license text attached as a plain text file in the tarball or zip file.

Maybe it's not strictly necessary, maybe it's just done that way out of tradition or habit, or maybe they do it that way for CYA reasons (so there's nothing left open to question or doubt).

As I understand it, it was once was necessary to attach the license to the top of every source file, but isn't strictly needed any more. It's probably good practise, though. There should definitely be a copy of the license included somewhere in the package though (usually as a text file).

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It would make so much more sense to apply CC licenses to such stuff; they are designed as content licenses, not source code licenses as all of the ones mentioned up until now are.

However, if you want to license your ACS, DECORATE, EDF, etc. code under such a license, that kinda makes sense.

Aeon code will have to be GPL.

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Quasar said:

It would make so much more sense to apply CC licenses to such stuff; they are designed as content licenses, not source code licenses as all of the ones mentioned up until now are.

However, if you want to license your ACS, DECORATE, EDF, etc. code under such a license, that kinda makes sense.

Agree with all this. It would be nice if we could get the upload template changed to include the Creative Commons licenses, and possibly the textmaker too.

Aeon code will have to be GPL.

What's Aeon?

EDIT: Oh, it's this. I see. I doubt you can really do that. There's no way you can really force anyone to release their code under a particular license.

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A big problem with the current system is that it does not distinguish between levels and the rest of the resources (assets such as sounds, sprites, textures; metadata such as MAPINFO/DEHACKED string replacements; actual code such as DECORATE/DEHACKED/etc., and so on).

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fraggle said:

There's no way you can really force anyone to release their code under a particular license.

The API exposed will be so powerful as to be a substitute for writing native code in the engine. I look at it as being a form of runtime linkage. If it's NOT required to make scripts written in it GPL, then Eternity's license will no longer mean anything, in effect.

And besides this ideal-based look at it, much of the default extension code that Aeon loads into the JS interpreter is already under open-source licenses - mostly BSD and some GPL. Since it's loaded by default, anything you create using it is automatically a derived work.

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printz said:

Here's another source of interpretation to one's advantage:

Authors may NOT use the contents of this file as a base for modification or
reuse.  Permissions have been obtained from original authors for any of
their resources modified or included in this file.

You MAY distribute this file, provided you include this text file, with no
modifications.  You may distribute this file in any electronic format (BBS,
Diskette, CD, etc) as long as you include this file intact.  I have
received permission from the original authors of any modified or included
content in this file to allow further distribution.
It's very minor, but it has been jokingly brought up during an argument on Doomworld. Notice how "this file" tag refers ambiguously to the content file or the text file.

I was thinking the same thing. How about this then:

* Copyright / Permissions *

Authors MAY NOT use the contents of Marbel.zip, in which this file is included,
as a base for modification or reuse without written permission from the author.

You MAY distribute Marbel.zip, with no modifications to the files that are
included therein. You MAY distribute Marbel.zip in any electronic format.

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Quasar said:

The API exposed will be so powerful as to be a substitute for writing native code in the engine. I look at it as being a form of runtime linkage. If it's NOT required to make scripts written in it GPL, then Eternity's license will no longer mean anything, in effect.

No offence but that sounds like a slight exaggeration to me.


And besides this ideal-based look at it, much of the default extension code that Aeon loads into the JS interpreter is already under open-source licenses - mostly BSD and some GPL. Since it's loaded by default, anything you create using it is automatically a derived work.

Well, you might get somewhere here.

In the end we could debate this issue until the cows come home and it would all be hot air - there's almost certainly never going to be a court case about the Eternity Engine and extension WADs. The flip side is that if you say that's the case and that all Eternity extensions must be GPL, most people will probably respect your wishes. So instead I'll frame it in a different way: what rights do you think authors should have?

There are plenty of compilers out there for various programming languages. I'll pick gcc as an example. Back when Richard Stallman wrote gcc he could probably have arranged the licensing around it (and glibc) such that you could only use it to compile free software. But even Stallman, with his polar extreme in thinking about how software ought to be distributed, didn't do that.

My general thinking about this issue is that you'd do better to take a more liberal approach. I'd strongly encourage authors to license their extensions under the GPL (and encouraging a culture of sharing around this stuff is a really good idea), but ultimately leave the choice to them. It would be a shame if there were mods that didn't get made, or if they ended up getting made with other source ports, all because of an argument over legal stuff.

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There's no obligation to use the permissions section exactly the way it's written in the template. Some time back, Ty Halderman more or less noted what he looks for in the copyright/permissions section. Personally, I'm using something derived from it but geared toward the WAD I'm making.

It seems more like you're saying you'd like it to be more compatible with Freedoom. But WAD-making isn't generally very independent and many WADs use materials copyrighted by id or other companies to make "fan material", which claims "fair use" to allow a bit of copyright messiness for non-commercial and relatively harmless activities.

Instead, why not just make recommendations about licensing and design practices on the Freedoom site (or its documentation) for WADs meant to be more in line with Freedoom and free software?

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Nobody's going to check the Freedoom site. Almost nobody cares about Freedoom. This much is obvious, since Freedoom is still missing tons of maps, and yet many dozen of community megawads have been created in the meantime (and tons more smaller projects as well).

It doesn't have to be this way. Sure, some DOOM or Heretic projects could decide to license all or some their maps under BSD, but that will only happen if the project leaders are really motivated to do that (I don't know any who are). Most times instead the PWAD gets released under one of the two existing template licenses. That would be fine, except for one big problem: those that get released under the "permissive" license can't be trully considered BSD-compatible, as the template license text is too vague to be meaningful (according to someone at FSF).

And mind you, I'm talking about maps only, which usually are original works (unlike sprites that are often modified IWAD sprites, or music that's often some MIDI downloaded from a web site, etc.)

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