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- From: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
- To: Thilo Pfennig <email pfennigsolutions de>
- Cc: games-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: sound, images, GPL and other licenses
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:11:23 +0000 (GMT)
On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Thilo Pfennig wrote: > Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:08:45 +0100 > From: Thilo Pfennig <email pfennigsolutions de> > To: games-list gnome org > Subject: sound, images, GPL and other licenses > > Hi, as I browsed some of the wav files in the gnome games one question > crossed my mind: > > Are all these images licensed under GPL? Is this also true for the > images and other art data? I have often wondered how the General Public License can really apply to data and things like templates and resource files since there is no linking going on. I suppose in the simplest case the fallback is copyright and you have very little right to use things but when it comes to something like a diagramming program where the templates are the necessary building blocks of any document you can hardly claim copyright over the newly created works. I spent crazy amounts of time writing some of SVG, actually typing up most of them and manually specifying coordinates so the line between code, graphics and graphical user interfaces gets very blurry for me sometimes. > If yes I thought if it might not be a good idea to dual license all > these stuff also under another license like CC-BY-SA-2.5 > and to put it online as seperate data? Acronyms! CC Creative Commons BY requires attribution SA share alike 2.5 Huh? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ > Why? > > To enable people to download and work on it and without following the > more strict GPL rules. Also i think GNOME could use some more of free > music, sounds and graphics that are now increasingly availabe under > Creative Commons licenses. Richard Stallman has made some interesting points about not wanting to endorse Creative Commons as a whole since they have such a confusingly broad spectrum of licenses, some of which offer very little freedom at all. I have contributed to OpenClipart.org and I am generally happy putting data files in the Public Domain (and 50 years copyright should be quite enough for anyone) to keep things simple. I'm pretty sure I submitted all the SVG I have contributed to Gnome Games to OpenClipart.org as well. I'd usually prefer the long established MIT license since it includes a liability disclaimer and requires the copyright attribution to be included (without going too far and becoming obnoxious advertising). Disclaimer of liability may be overkill but with more complext data files like sound files I'd rather be safe than sorry. This is effectively the same as CC-BY-SA as far as I can tell. I have a vague feeling the Gnome Games maintainers might have asked for the artists to provide more permissions than just GPL to keep things simple, but maybe not. Jimmac and Tigert have always been very generous in their licensing and are the source of so much Gnome artwork it seems unfair to do anything other than be at least as generous as they have been. > I would like to see a place where game maintainers put and get their > material on. Some sounds can be shared or at least remixed. See also > http://ccmixter.org/ > > What y think? Certainly wouldn't hurt to make it clear how exactly the data files are licensed but checking them and attempting to relicense them could be a long and time consuming process. Sincerely Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhorkan http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
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