A random google search turns up lots of people who think that art assets are not covered, and a few people who think that art assets are covered. Neither group, of course, is important to this discussion.. rather, the only practical factor here is whether ZeroC feels like suing you, and how things would go there. I've not heard of any actual legal tests of this particular question. You may want to simply ask them whether they'd sue you. Of course, as Rycross said, keeping your assets closed-source so that nobody else could redistribute your app on even footing is clearly not in the spirit of the GPL.

Quote: Original post by Rycross
Now I don't recall whether art assets are covered. Sneftel says that they are, but I seem to recall that they are not. That is, the GPL only regards software, but not necessarily assets used by the software. However, its certainly not in the spirit, and so I may actually be wrong in that assumption.

I need sleep, so pardon if I translate art asset wrongly and this post is unnecessary, but at least what you create with gpl software (i.e. program output) is not covered by the gpl. Blender sees it like that, too (source):

Quote: Can I sell my Blender creations?

Anything you create with Blender - whether it's graphics, movies, scripts, exported 3d files or the .blend files themselves - is your sole property, and can be licensed or sold under any conditions you prefer.

So I can make games without having to worry about the GPL, right?

Games created in Blender (.blend files) are program output and therefore not covered by the GPL. You can consider them your property, and license or sell them freely.
With stand-alone games however, any data that is included inside the actual stand-alone executable is covered by the GPL. If this is a problem then you should set up the stand-alone player so it reads from external .blend files. A common practice is to include a "please wait, loading..." scene in the standalone, and read level files externally.
The Blender standalone player or the game player can be sold commercially too, but you have to make it available under the GPL conditions.

So I own the copyright to all output?

In almost every circumstance for blender, only the code and other GPL'd files themselves are covered. Any output of such material is copyright the person who produced the output, in this case, the artist.

Quote: Original post by phresnel
I need sleep, so pardon if I translate art asset wrongly and this post is unnecessary, but at least what you create with gpl software (i.e. program output) is not covered by the gpl. Blender sees it like that, too:

A little bit different, because the assets in questions are things that are program input for the GPLed work, not program output. Since the assets in question are required for the program to properly function, one could argue that not releasing them under a GPL-compatible license is violating the *spirit* of the GPL. However, the spirit of the GPL doesn't amount to a hill of beans in a legal discussion, and, like I said, I'm not a lawyer.

Ok well here is what ICE says about game assets:

The test is whether your code links with Ice (static or dynamic). Loading game assets, like music files, 3D models, or textures, isn't linking. Otherwise you couldn't have GPL'd MP3 player or picture library either.

As for the plug-in question, please see Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

I have now asked them about changing license types once we get the money. Waiting for a response from them back. But based on the fact that the game assets can be closed source I think we will stick with ICE. We have gotten farther just in the past couple days once we switched to ICE then what we had in a couple months trying to add a C++ layer to our Java Server so that we could use Raknet.

Quote: Original post by Rycross
Now I don't recall whether art assets are covered. Sneftel says that they are, but I seem to recall that they are not. That is, the GPL only regards software, but not necessarily assets used by the software. However, its certainly not in the spirit, and so I may actually be wrong in that assumption.

It all depends on what how exactly the program's license is phrased. What, exactly, is released under the GPL? Is it just the source code?

You can release any work covered by copyright law under the GPL; hell, you can release plain text files under the GPL. Though the GPL is targeted towards the use of it in software source code, there is nothing in it which prevents it from being used for a text file. Michael Stutz of the Free Software Foundation explains this. There are many different non-program works released under the GPL, and an explanation of how the terms in the GPL may be applied in such a situation can be found here.

That being said, you can also release the artwork for a game under a different license. I have chosen this approach in my Free Software video game, Humm and Strumm, in which the source code is released under the GNU GPLv3, and all other assets (text files, music, artwork, even documentation comments) are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

I'm not a lawyer, so this isn't true legal advice; I do hope that this cleared up the licensing issue more. Look into the exact phrasing used in the license header of the program.

Cheers,
Patrick

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
A random google search turns up lots of people who think that art assets are not covered, and a few people who think that art assets are covered. Neither group, of course, is important to this discussion.. rather, the only practical factor here is whether ZeroC feels like suing you, and how things would go there. I've not heard of any actual legal tests of this particular question. You may want to simply ask them whether they'd sue you. Of course, as Rycross said, keeping your assets closed-source so that nobody else could redistribute your app on even footing is clearly not in the spirit of the GPL.

When money is involved this is why I stay away from GPL. There are just to many hidden things to get you. I swore art wasn't covered under GPL but not everybody sees it that way.