Licensing

[Mozork]

I'm currently looking into licensing, or more precisely the licenses for the stuff we're using and whether we know who the authors are, which brings me to my first point.

1) I would appreciate it if anyone could take a quick look at the AUTHORS file in our data_extern directory and verify that his works (or works who's creator you know) are properly accredited to him (or the person that created that particular piece).

Also there are some things that caught my attention.

2) Sound
Most of the authors (except for a small portion) are in the AUTHORS file, however many of the licenses are CC by-nc-nd, which is non-commercial, is this compatible with our open source licensing?
Additionally, the first two:
audio/ambient/default/allgorythm-lift_up.ogg
audio/ambient/default/allgorythm-resonance_blaster.ogg
Apparently are from http://www.bediff.com, but i can't find them on there, nor any hints to how they're licensed so I suggest we lose them. (I'm not even sure we're currently using them)

3) Fonts
We have a lot of fonts in there, but for most of them the license is not clear. Then there are some (Blue Highway fonts) for which a license is included, but redistribution is not explicitly allowed. Only Vera Mono is a font that can be used in a way that is compatible with open source licenses but the license is not included, which it should be (it can be found here though: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/, so I'll probably add it some time soon).
Same goes for gui/fonts. Commonwealth is only licensed for non-commercial use. Deja Vu Sans and fkp.de seem to be ok, the others not so much.

That's all for now.
I'm going to go through the commit history of the data_extern directory, which will probably help to find most of the (more recent) authors but I would also suggest to remove unused files of which we (after some effort) are not able to find the authors.

[greenman]

1) will do this as soon as i have time for it, but unfortunately i don't know that many authors/creations of content. maybe felix and beni (both of them) should have a closer look at it

about removing things: i think we should find out which files in the data-trunk we do not use and exclude them at least from the release (deb) packages if not move them out of data. that way our orxonox-data package doesn't get too big

[x3n]

i'll also have a look at the AUTHORS file.

many files (i assume also the fonts) are from Ogre, so maybe you find more hints about their license there. and since Ogre has basically the same license like us, i hope we can use those files.

CC by-nc-nd: it's not compatible with our license

edit: what about the files which aren't in the data-trunk atm? We have lots of currently unused files. didn't we try to archive them some time ago? we should also add author/license notes for those files.

[beni]

Well, I created the first draft of the AUTHORS file a long time ago and put the things in I knew back then, but I can of course have another look now.

To point 2) of Mozork's post: I don't know how the two songs are licensed. I have the All-Go-Rhythm album though and can have a look. My fear is that they are copyright protected, but I also know that the bediff guys gave it to us to use it in the game a long time ago. I don't know what that means exactly from a license point of view. All I know is that we have permission to use it. However if we don't use it anyway, we could also kick them out.
And yes, the site was revamped a couple of times, so the songs are no longer available on the site. There were also a couple of render images that were created for Orxonox as well, but I think it's hard to find any reference of Orxonox on the site anymore.

I have a question about the licensing. Can't we combine different licenses? As long as we don't release Orxonox commercially content could be non-commercially licensed, right? If we (or anybody else) wants to release or reuse Orxonox for commercial purposes these contents would just have to be taken out. The question is, if we'd want that, but theoretically we could, right?

[x3n]

I also know that the bediff guys gave it to us to use it in the game a long time ago. I don't know what that means exactly from a license point of view.

Well in my opinion this means that we can distribute it with "our" license, as if it was created in the PPS.

I have a question about the licensing. Can't we combine different licenses? As long as we don't release Orxonox commercially content could be non-commercially licensed, right? If we (or anybody else) wants to release or reuse Orxonox for commercial purposes these contents would just have to be taken out. The question is, if we'd want that, but theoretically we could, right?

Yes we could, but if we have some content with commercial license and some content with non-commercial license, we can't release orxonox with a commercial license, so we have to use non-commercial packet repositories for debian and related systems. I don't know if that's a problem, but last time we talked about this topic, it was said to be a bad idea.

[beni]

1.) Probably, they know that we're an open-source project, so they'd have to expect us to release it freely. Bensch would now more on that. I'll ask him next month.

2.) True, it is generally frowned upon in the open-source community when there are packages that are "non-free". Some people avoid them or even refuse to install them. For the Ubuntu repositories it would mean that the Orxonox package (or at least "orxonox-data") would have to be classified as Multiverse instead of Universe. That is generally not a problem, but if avoidable, we shouldn't do that.

[Mozork]

So I've dug trough all the commit messages that I could find and added the one that added the file to our svn repository as the author of that file in the AUTHORS file. Whenever I was not certain, whether the one adding the file was actually the author of it, I appended a little question mark.
As a result there are now not many files with unknown authors (~50), albeit some with a questionable author. (~120)

This is all that I can do, now it would be very helpful if everyone could have a look at the files that still have an unknown author and the files with their own name as author (as changed by r7217 ), especially if there is a question mark appended and rectify if I mistakenly announced them as author of some file, while they're not.

Thanks.

[x3n]

thanks, as I already told you some of the files are from the Ogre samples, I'll probably fix this soon.

but eitherway, is it really necessary to list the authors of each single file? i can't really believe that. look at ogre: the package contains an AUTHORS file that lists all contributors in random order. no note about single files, even though ogre ships with a bunch of samples and media files. or cegui, it includes fonts and styles, but the authors are only shortly listed in the documentation. and openarena, the quake-clone that is also installed on tardis, contains no AUTHORS file at all...

all those packages are also available on ubuntu and the likes and there seems to be no issue with licensing at all. so why on earth do we have to list the author of each single file, which is a shitload of work and complete bullshit anyway? can someone please verify this again, because it seems pretty unlikely to me.

[erwin]

The AUTHORS file isn't nescessarily for distribution of the binary package. It's more a file to speed up a possible approval into the Debian repositories. Perhaps not every file needs to be listed applying authors to subdirectories and groups of files makes it more readable. Special note has to be given to files which don't have our default license as they need to be listed in the debian/copyright file.

Btw: Openarena has a credits file which is similar to our AUTHORS file.

[Mozork]

Also some of the files we use are released under the condition of attribution and I'm not sure whether it would be sufficient to just mention them without stating which files exactly have been created by them.

The file by Openarena, however seem much less specific than ours is, so perhaps we could be a little lazier.

[x3n]

the credits file of OpenArena looks pretty much like I expect our AUTHORS file to look like.

but yeah, I understand the point about approval into a Debian repository. but we can probably simplify this, right? I don't think they require an author for every 10x10 pixel image. so we should probably just state the author for every model and large textures (where we can summarize entries, for example "sl_metal_* -> Martin Polak" or "[some shader] -> xxx; all other cg scripts -> Ogre". and of course sound files, but they're easier to overview.

and yes @ attribution, but doesn't that mean that other projects would have to state "Orxonox" as the author of a file?

edit: and on a side note, I don't think anyone at a Debian repository will check the authors file per file. I guess they're more interested in whether or not we take this serious and don't just upload a ton of models without authors.

[adi]

I just opened a ticket for creating a basic data package.

edit: and on a side note, I don't think anyone at a Debian repository will check the authors file per file. I guess they're more interested in whether or not we take this serious and don't just upload a ton of models without authors.

Actually the ftpmaster team looks at every file in new packages, my first package in Debian got rejected two times because I forgot to mention some licenses in the copyright file. New packages may hang some time in NEW before they get accepted. Altough it's easy to do copyright violations by uploading a new version of a package already in Debian which doesn't go through NEW.

[Mozork]

So this basically means that we need to have a license for every file we have. But do we also have to have an author specified?

I think at the moment almost all the licensing issues are resolved. There is an audio mood (d'n'b) which has some cc by nc licensed audio files in it, but we could just release that mood as a non-free package couldn't we? (I think it would be a good idea to release all of the alternative moods as separate additional packages, to make data_extern a little smaller and still allow for different audio moods, is that feasible?)

Also for some files we don't know the authors and there is a new font I included, which we are allowed to use (asked the author), but I'm not sure under which license it is, so I'll probably have to clarify that before we can really include it.

[adi]

In general authors should be mentioned. I think it's ok just to mention "Orxonox Development Team" or similar, when a lot of different people worked on something, and then make sure these people get mentioned somewhere.