Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by Valderman
but we still get a spectacular kneejerk reaction whenever the GPL is mentioned because someone has the temerity to require something in return for letting you use their hard work.

They don't require something in return, but everything. You can't just select the parts you would like to share. You are essentially losing control, and in practice even ownership, over your own IP. GPL (or similar licenses, like AGPL or also the CCSA) are an all or nothing decision.

All that is fine if you're a hobbyist and don't care about making money with your IP. But in the (commercial) context of an MMO, where assets can be very valuable, these questions are very important.

That's my feeling also. I have no problem giving something back, but I don't want to give everything, then there's nothing left to make my server unique, no reason for people to pay a cash shop price or subscription fee if they can have anything they want free by setting up their own copy of my server. But on the upside, the GPL license of the software does not actually affect the art contents. If you make all new art contents there's no requirement to release those.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow

Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by Valderman
but we still get a spectacular kneejerk reaction whenever the GPL is mentioned because someone has the temerity to require something in return for letting you use their hard work.

They don't require something in return, but everything. You can't just select the parts you would like to share. You are essentially losing control, and in practice even ownership, over your own IP. GPL (or similar licenses, like AGPL or also the CCSA) are an all or nothing decision.

All that is fine if you're a hobbyist and don't care about making money with your IP. But in the (commercial) context of an MMO, where assets can be very valuable, these questions are very important.

That's my feeling also. I have no problem giving something back, but I don't want to give everything, then there's nothing left to make my server unique, no reason for people to pay a cash shop price or subscription fee if they can have anything they want free by setting up their own copy of my server.

[sarcasm]
Yes I could never imagine a business making money from Linux distributions, can you?
[/sarcasm]
Valderman it is not just these forums that have a fear of GPL. It is pretty easy in my eyes, if you do not want to use GPL then the answer is simple.

Quote: Original post by Yann L

Quote: Original post by Valderman
but we still get a spectacular kneejerk reaction whenever the GPL is mentioned because someone has the temerity to require something in return for letting you use their hard work.

They don't require something in return, but everything. You can't just select the parts you would like to share. You are essentially losing control, and in practice even ownership, over your own IP. GPL (or similar licenses, like AGPL or also the CCSA) are an all or nothing decision.

All that is fine if you're a hobbyist and don't care about making money with your IP. But in the (commercial) context of an MMO, where assets can be very valuable, these questions are very important.

If you want to make money with your work, this would be a problem if your business model relies on you being the sole provider of the software and/or the user not being able to modify it. Most useful libraries come under the LGPL (which IMO is a far more reasonable license for code building blocks like libraries) anyway, so the "share everything or die" bit rarely bites you.

If, on the other hand, you want to build something on a significant piece of someone else's work, such as Ryzom, I think the GPL is entirely reasonable; your product is essentially a somewhat modified version of someone else's work, so why shouldn't you share everything? After all, your "everything" isn't all that much compared to the "everything" you're building on. Of course there are corner cases, such as perhaps only wanting to use the Ryzom networking component or something, where the GPL gets a bit unreasonable. More granularity would be desirable there, but it'd be pretty hard to come up with such a license.

Furthermore, the "oh noes share all" bit isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. The closed source nVidia Linux graphics driver is the best example; it's clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel, so they put a GPL compatibility wrapper around it. The phone in my pocket runs Maemo, a Linux-based operating system with a few closed source system components.

In closing, I'm not saying "everyone who doesn't want to use the GPL is a retard;" I do recognize your objections, even if I think many of them are overstated, and I don't subscribe to the belief that non-free software is immoral. However, the extreme hostility and FUD against the GPL in general often seen on GDNet is sort of annoying.

Quote: Original post by Saruman

Quote: Original post by Valderman
What's so horrible about it? You just got tons of work done for you, if you choose to use it, so why shouldn't you contribute something in return?

The funny thing is that the majority of BSD-type licensed open source projects have much more commits from people who are not the project owners. I know myself that I would never contribute to a GPL project, but I have committed quite a lot of code to MIT/BSD licensed projects.

Uh, citation needed.

I suspect that for everybody who, like you, could never imagine contributing to a GPL project, there is somebody who could never imagine contributing to a MIT/BSD licensed project. And then there's the vast majority of people for whom licenses *aren't* a religion who contribute to projects with both types of licenses.

Let's see... judging from the sample that is GD, it seems that people interested in game development tend to be more hostile towards the GPL than the average. So it seems at least conceivable that within game development related open source projects, those with a MIT/BSD license receive more contributions - though even for that, where's your data to back it up.

But then, other fields work quite differently. Where are the successful MIT/BSD licensed desktop environments, for example?

Quote: Original post by Prefect

But then, other fields work quite differently. Where are the successful MIT/BSD licensed desktop environments, for example?

Did you really mean to include BSD into that question?
To me it shows a lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, NetBSD et al and also an understanding of the BSD/MIT licenses, as it does not require further derivatives to be under them such as Mac Osx.

[Edited by - CmpDev on May 8, 2010 6:17:54 PM]

Quote: Original post by CmpDev

Quote: Original post by Prefect

But then, other fields work quite differently. Where are the successful MIT/BSD licensed desktop environments, for example?

Did you really mean to include BSD into that question?
To me it shows a lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, NetBSD et al and also an understanding of the BSD/MIT licenses, as it does not require further derivatives to be under them such as Mac Osx.

The primary desktop enviroments used by FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD are GPL licensed (KDE for PC-BSD, Gnome for FreeBSD, FVWM for OpenBSD) , XFCE is probably the only notable DE that is available under BSDL, (its components are dual licensed BSDL/GPL for applications and BSDL/LGPL for libraries).

Quote: Original post by SimonForsman

Quote: Original post by CmpDev

Quote: Original post by Prefect

But then, other fields work quite differently. Where are the successful MIT/BSD licensed desktop environments, for example?

Did you really mean to include BSD into that question?
To me it shows a lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, NetBSD et al and also an understanding of the BSD/MIT licenses, as it does not require further derivatives to be under them such as Mac Osx.

The primary desktop enviroments used by FreeBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD are GPL licensed (KDE for PC-BSD, Gnome for FreeBSD, FVWM for OpenBSD) , XFCE is probably the only notable DE that is available under BSDL, (its components are dual licensed BSDL/GPL for applications and BSDL/LGPL for libraries).

Erm SORRY.
I hang my head and will eat my hat. I read that as meaning OS's not window systems. :)

I don't see myself as having a hostility toward or fear of GPL and CC licenses. I've licensed some of my own art as CC. I just don't know how an MMO that had 100% GPL and CC content would be able to earn enough money to keep itself running and growing. Ryzom itself hasn't released 100% of its assets, they intentionally did not give out maps and quests so no one can just set up their own Ryzom server. I think it's totally fair of me to want to do the same, keep enough % or assets private to prevent cloning the game.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I don't see myself as having a hostility toward or fear of GPL and CC licenses. I've licensed some of my own art as CC. I just don't know how an MMO that had 100% GPL and CC content would be able to earn enough money to keep itself running and growing. Ryzom itself hasn't released 100% of its assets, they intentionally did not give out maps and quests so no one can just set up their own Ryzom server. I think it's totally fair of me to want to do the same, keep enough % or assets private to prevent cloning the game.

Since you're providing a service rather than a product with an MMO, would it really be that much of an issue?

Anyway, the maps and quests wouldn't be derivative works of the Ryzom code. I'm not entirely up to date on the text of the AGPL, but since it allows aggregate works with non-(A)GPL works there should be some way to keep the quests to yourself. IANAL though, and copyright is pretty messy when it comes to things like programs loading data.

Quote: Original post by Valderman
What's so horrible about it? You just got tons of work done for you, if you choose to use it, so why shouldn't you contribute something in return?

I think the attitude towards the GPL on GDNet is "interesting," to put it nicely. Everyone agrees that software pirates are the source of all evil because they use content without giving anything in return, but we still get a spectacular kneejerk reaction whenever the GPL is mentioned because someone has the temerity to require something in return for letting you use their hard work. Don't like it? Well, write your own software without leeching off of others' software then! The GPL doesn't randomly "infect" software, as some people here seem to imply; you just need to give something back if you want to build on it.

Years ago I didn't mind the GPL. To me it seemed a practical way to use a strong copyleft license; "I share with you my code as long as whatever you do with it, you share your code with me." It's the "free software" ideological movement against proprietary software that's intrinsic to the license that got to me; it veers from being political to almost a religion. The FSF has an "us and them" mentality where if you don't agree with them on everything then you're treated as either stupid or evil, and this really got to me after years of reading their arguments. I've written proprietary software in the past. I'll write it in the future. If they regard me as the "enemy", I feel uncomfortable having anything to do with them.

Plus the whole doublespeak nature of "free software" bugs me. The FSF and the GNU project mention "freedom" every sentence like they're auditioning for Braveheart, but most of the time they seem to be railing against practices they think should be banned. Their ideal vision for how my project should be "truly free" is for me to only use their license and give all copyright rights to them, either explicitly through assignment or implicitly by using a "GPLv3 or later" clause so they can restrict their license further in the name of "freedom". Only by using what the FSF say is acceptable can I be "free". Funny coincidence the GNU project was launched in 1984.

Not that I mind so much about Ryzom going AGPL rather than something else. It makes a fair amount of sense for a commercial company to pick the most popular strong copyleft license.