I want to clarify some points and PS position. There were a number of mistakes in the discussion above.
1) PlaneShift is a legally recognized organization, it took about 1 year to build with the help of a lawyer. Everything written in our licenses, agreement and such have been validated by many hours spent with lawyers. They are valid like any other license, that is until they are brought to court and discussed. The same is valid for GPL license or any other.
2) Is it perfectly legal for an artist to assign copyright in Europe and in US. The work done for PlaneShift Organization is like \'work for hire\', like in any commercial company. So the copyright is legally transferred to Atomic Blue. When you work for a company they ask you to transfer all the copyright to them in the work contract and usually it\'s implicit in the work for hire terminology. In PlaneShift project it\'s explicit in the members agreement. Every member has to sign that document.
3) A non-profit organization can make money. The difference between a non-profit org and a company is that the NPO cannot redistribute the revenue as much as it please to the employees or managers. The revenue can be reinvested in other activities, but for example a car for an employee is doable, salaries for employees are doable, etc... So it can work as a normal company except that it cannot use the money for the only benefit of employees, the money spent has to be \"used\" for the operations of the organization.
4) \"Open source\", \"GPL\" and \"free\" are three different concepts.
- Open Source is usually a term that defines the source code of a program being visible to the public. This definition is what we use.
- GPL is a specialization of Open Source in which not only the code is visible, but has a number of other clauses for which it has to be kept under GPL by the ones that modifies it. We are GPL for code. Please NOTE that this doesn\'t hinder any ability to relicense the code. The copyright holders (in this case Atomic Blue) can relicense the code at any time. From that point on the old source remains GPL and can be used as GPL, the same code forks into the new license and from that point on is under a different license. I think this will happen to PlaneShift only if we find GPL too limiting or if someone is trying to exploit GPL against us, or if court will find GPL not valid (this may really happen in my opinion, and we will have the chance to move from that deadlock).
- free can have many different interpretations. In PlaneShift we give player access to the game server and to the client for free, that\'s it. Any other free interpretations are usually not applicable to PS.
5) We surely are not a common Open Source project. The idea to keep the code open source is to leverage the power of the internet, not just for the sake of OS. Our main goal is the game itself, not the open source. We will keep open source and free at soon as that doesn\'t damage the game.
