Force maps to be CC-BY-SA ????

[titi]

As it is always really annoying to know which license a map has, I had the idea to force people to use a "good" license for MG maps.
How about the idea to force maps in the game to be licenced under the CC-BY-SA License ? So a field in the map editor where the map creator can apply that his map is under CC-BY-SA license.
If he is not willing to apply to this license the map will not work in the (default) engine later.

I know its a very controversy idea, but what do you think about this idea and do you think this is a legal way to force people to make their maps license compatible  ?

[andy_5995]

I don't have a strong opinion on this.

I think a field for the license is a good idea. Perhaps just make it a field that can't be changed, so it's CC-BY-SA by default. And if a user tries to edit the license, a message displays saying "According to the TOS, maps can only be licensed CC-BY-SA. Thank you for playing MegaGlest."

[John.d.h]

Does it count as freedom if it's forced?  I can understand not wanting to include copyright-restricted works in the official mod distribution center, but keeping other works from being played is an antifeature -- a deliberate crippling of the software.

[titi]

Yeah maybe thats too restrictive, but to force people to choose a license might be  a good idea. This means a map cannot be played if no license is choosen.

As license we give the options:

• Public Domain
• CC-BY-SA
• CC-BY
• Other License type ( these kind of maps cannot be included in the game )

People must choose form this list, if no license is set map will not work ....

[softcoder]

This is a good idea and solves everyones need.

[MuwuM]

maybe we should add this to the map file definition. To avoid confusion increase the map version level to 3

struct MapFileHeader {
   int32 version;
   int32 maxFactions;
   int32 width;
   int32 height;
   int32 heightFactor;
   int32 waterLevel;
   int8 title[MAX_TITLE_LENGTH];
   int8 author[MAX_AUTHOR_LENGTH];
   union {
      int8 description[MAX_DESCRIPTION_LENGTH];
      struct {
         int8 short_desc[MAX_DESCRIPTION_LENGTH_VERSION2];
         int32 magic; // 0x01020304 for meta
         int32 cliffLevel;
         int32 cameraHeight;
         int32 license; // 0 = other license/ no license maintained => will not run; 10 = CC-BY-SA; 50 = CC-BY; 100 = Public Domain (sorted from restrictive to not restrictive, numbers enable us to add others between)
         int8 meta[112];
      } version2;
   };
};

We should also provide an easy way to 'upgrade' maps with new license

[tomreyn]

I like the ideas of

• extending the map format to allow for a machine readable license declaration
  (we will need to provide a GUI utility to allow for making these declarations)
• to make the game require a machine readable license declaration
  (we will need to facilitate this conversion for modders and players who wish to play existing non mod DB maps)
• to (continue to) restrict the mod DB to a given set of liberal licenses
  (it should be noted that this set of licenses may change in the future, and we need to provide instructions on how to make compatible maps)

Please not that there is no CC-BY-SA license. There are several versions of this license, as well as localizations of it. Some of which can be incompatible. So at least for the file format we will need to have explicit values for e.g. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Germany and CC-BY-SA 3.0 United States to create anything useful. Other than that it could be limited to a boolean field which just states "GPL 3.0 compatible" or similar.

[kagu]

Forcing only Free maps to be included, will make the game fascist (for the lack of the better word).
Knowing the license could be nice, but restricting the game on what can user/player can do, doesn't comply with Free Culture.
Jailbraking and Rooting is what we fight with other software, don't do the oposite of it.

[titi]

As I said before I have no plans to not allow other licenses , the only thing I want to force it to set a license,
But in geenral I want to mention that we indeed force people to use the software in a special way! We have GPL License and this means we force people to use the software just under this conditions., which means they are not free to do whatever they want with the code. So forcing a special license for the maps is not so evil as it is a bit similar, but I don't want to do it anyway, so no need to discuss this any further.

@tomreyn: I don't want to add a ton of licenses to choose from! In fact we just need one License which is compatible with the games maps and "others" .
So adding GPL and such things is not somehing I want , for me thats simply "other licenses".
Keep in mind that we only talk about maps here which are made with the map editor!!! This is no general mod license discussion.
The point why I add public domain is , that I don't need to do anything to include this map in the game. For every other license I would have to do something. The only thing I would be willing to do is mentioning the name/username of the one who made the map.

By this the list to choose from should maybe look more like:
- Public domain
- CC-By ( or somehting else where you just have to list the name or alias( aka playername  )
- other license ( those will not be included in the main game later )

update: I think we need to add CC-BY-SA unported at least internally too, as this is the license the current maps have and we would need to convert them.

[MuwuM]

then we should allow free text for custom licenses

struct MapFileHeader {
   int32 version;
   int32 maxFactions;
   int32 width;
   int32 height;
   int32 heightFactor;
   int32 waterLevel;
   int8 title[MAX_TITLE_LENGTH];
   int8 author[MAX_AUTHOR_LENGTH];
   union {
      int8 description[MAX_DESCRIPTION_LENGTH];
      struct {
         int8 short_desc[MAX_DESCRIPTION_LENGTH_VERSION2];
         int32 magic; // 0x01020304 for meta
         int32 cliffLevel;
         int32 cameraHeight;
         int32 license; // 0 = other license; 1 = CC-BY-SA (version corresponding to megaglest release); 2 = CC-BY (version corresponding to megaglest release); 3 = Public Domain
         int8 other_license_name[112];
      } version2;
   };
};

[titi]

@MuwuM thats still in discussion state, no action needed anywhere yet.  (but the future change will look like this)

[MuwuM]

@MuwuM thats still in discussion state, no action needed anywhere yet.  (but the future change will look like this)

I'm totally aware of the discussion state, as I did much work on the map-format I just recommended an implementation.

It was pretty confusing, that there were changes to the map-format without changing the version...

[filux]

...
[/list]Please not that there is no CC-BY-SA license. There are several versions of this license, as well as localizations of it. Some of which can be incompatible. So at least for the file format we will need to have explicit values for e.g. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Germany and CC-BY-SA 3.0 United States to create anything useful....

...
@tomreyn: I don't want to add a ton of licenses to choose from! In fact we just need one License which is compatible with the games maps and "others" ....

Just use CC BY-SA 4.0 where ~ biggest change in comparison to 3.0 is exactly resolving "unported" problems.

[tomreyn]

CC-BY-SA 4.0 International should be a good choice for newly released or re-/multi-licensed assets, i.e. for license declarations.

However, a restriction which makes a statement on positively accepted licenses should not be based on CC-BY-SA 4.0 International (or not only), since this license is not backwards compatible (to CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported or ported licenses or earlier versions).

The CC-BY-SA license family is forward compatible, though. As such, a restriction stating that acceptable licenses "must be compatible to CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported or any ported versions, or later versions (ported or not), or licenses declared to be compatible to this and later versions (ported and unported)" should work. This would effectively allow all CC-BY-SA 3.0 and 4.0 licenses as well as GNU GPL 3.0 and Free Art license 1.3.