Hello all,
I've been trying to write this post for a few months, and have decided to just write a short one announcing this seeing as we decided this last year.... (NEW YEAR JOKE!!!)
Over the years there have been periodic comments that the licence we have been using has been seen as over restrictive and has put many people off contributing. From my experience in settings I can only remember 1 person asking about it and pulling out, and 1 just not liking it.
Never the less I brough up relaxing the contribution rules for the Settings department, as this is the one I have the most influence in. The devs, having chatted about it, have decided, on a trial bases just to see how well it works, to allow work to be submitted to PlaneShift under a public GNU licensing.
So how does this change things?Well for making quests there are two main differences,
- When a quest is added to PlaneShift under this licence a note will be added in the quest header (like the one below for code) declaring the quest to be in the public domain.
/** @file scripting.cpp
*/
/*
* scripting.cpp - by Kenneth Graunke <email here>
*
* Copyright (C) 2009 Atomic Blue (info@planeshift.it, http://www.atomicblue.org)
*
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
* as published by the Free Software Foundation (version 2 of the License)
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
* GNU General Public License for more details.
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
*
*/ - People will be able to write quests freely and submit them to a dev like myself w/e they want.
Now, all quests submitted to PlaneShift under this license will still have to be approved before adding in game exactly like quests now so that won't change.
Another downside I see with this work is that it would mean that players could read these new quests before they are added in game, make a choice about what path they want to take, and take it with no chance or being surprised or annoyed with the choices they made. Due to this I would ask anyone intersted in making quests under this new policy to keep somewhat secret until a month or two after they are added in game so that current players can do the quest without the chance of reading it before hand.
But on a brighter side, making these quests eventually public will allow us to build repositories of quests which can be used as examples and bases for new quests which groups of people can all work on .
This new licence not apply to any quests already in game, nor to ones that people like me write and add as I quite like keeping quests secret and allowing players to experience them as they go.
This being already decided was in part why I have started building lots of base example for players, like here,
Quest making information and real world examples So really, questions? comments?
Venalan
