Friendly warning about your use of the GPL licence

[Lindorie]

Planeshift is not in compliance with the GPL.

The GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html) can\'t be linked with another proprietary license, such as the Planeshift License.  GPL-covered software can\'t depend on proprietary modules, such as the art, models, music, texts, names, setting, etc. Specifically, it would not be legal to distribute the GPL-covered parts of Planeshift with these proprietary pieces.

These problems go away if your source code is released under the Lesser General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html). The LGPL is intended for software that can be linked with proprietary pieces. Crystal Space is released under such a license, so anyone can use it, even proprietary software pieces such as Planeshift.

I think it would be better if the PlaneShift team made clear that Planeshift as a whole is in fact *proprietary software.* Your current web page (http://www.planeshift.it/download_source.html) is very misleading; it describes the philosophy of open-source/free software. This philosophy says that the receiver of a piece of software should be able to use it for any purpose they would like, including modifying and redistributing it (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html#AboutFreeSoftware and http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php). The PlaneShift team asserts that the open-source/free software philosophy is not viable for building a game of this type (http://www.planeshift.it/pslicense.html), therefore, they use a proprietary license. Which is fine: the PlaneShift team has the right to decide upon their own license terms. What is not fine is pretending that Planeshift is open-source/free software. The LGPL\'ed covered parts are, but they don\'t do much without the proprietary pieces.

I hope the PlaneShift team takes these issues seriously.

Keep in mind, I have no hard feelings towards the PlaneShift team. They seem to be making a fantastic MMORPG. I look forward to playing it, proprietary software or not.

[Saphire]

?(

Huh?
Lamens terms, plz... so the rest of us can understand what this means for PS

BTW, i\'d guess they\'ll only release the code when the game is finished; which it isn\'t, obviously... :rolleyes:

[lostprophet]

Seriously, what are you talking about? As far as I understood, PS isn\'t copyrighted, and doesn\'t use any other copyrighted engines or other material, so how could it get in trouble? They\'re not stopping anyone from taking the source, once it\'s done.

Edit: I think I understand what you\'re saying now. The engine is open source, not the character models. maps or music. Anyone can take the engine, but would have to contact the team if they wanted to take maps etc and modify them for use in another game. You don\'t need the other stuff to develop something else based on the CrystalSpace engine.

[Kiern]

Ok, first I will say, I have no idea whether what you say matters to PS, because I really don\'t care.

Anyways, there have been many people like you, who come here, give the devs a \"friendly warning\" and have no idea what this game is and do not care.  First off, if you were smart, you would contact the devs directly instead of posting about the problem where everyone can read about it.  

That\'s a problem for many reasons, one of them being is if your wrong you look like an idiot (although i\'m not saying your wrong, or that you care as you obviously are not part of this community) but another problem is it probably ends up giving the devs even more unecessary problems.

Instead, you could have contacted Venge, Talad, Boonet, or Acraig...who are obviously the moderators of these forums, and therefore connected with the dev team. (even if they were not on the dev team, which they are)

So, this makes me think you really haven\'t looked around as much as you seem to think you have, and maybe missed something (once again, I\'m not saying that you have)

In other words, get in contact with one of the devs and they will fix it, not the community.

[Drilixer]

yal don\'t flame the poor guy  He does bring up some viable points if you actually nick pick through the technical-mumbo jumbo that he used to utterly confuse the fanbase...

but in response to his worries... so what if it isn\'t completely open source friendly... we don\'t want it to be  This is an mmorpg and we are putting a hell of alot of work into it... why would we want someone to come in copy it and then throw their name on it  The current liscense has been waded through by Luca and all those other \'godly devs\' so I\'d just like to say that there is no reason to \'warn\' us about this...

[hook]

Lindorie, thanks for bringing that up.

Your solution is prefectly alright, and i have to agree that GPL shouldn\'t (cannot) be used with other licenses in the same package. But there is also another, maybe a bit more elegant way (the the GPL fanatic). This is that you use separate packages for the GPL\'d source and the artwork under Planeshift license in this case. As far as i remember that\'s how it\'s (at least was, last time i checked) done in the CVS reporsitory and on the sourceforge.net page of planeshift ...these two are the only two official ways of getting the source. So (if the situation is still as i remember it) Planeshift is alright.

p.s. i\'m a law student

[hook]

Originally posted by Saphire
?(

Huh?
Lamens terms, plz... so the rest of us can understand what this means for PS

BTW, i\'d guess they\'ll only release the code when the game is finished; which it isn\'t, obviously... :rolleyes:

the source code, considering it\'s an open source project, is always attainable (and released) ...in PS\'s case, and most other open source projets, it\'s attainable both via the CVS reporsitory and released on the web (in PS\'s and most cases on sourceforge.net)

[Drilixer]

Originally posted by hook

Originally posted by Saphire
?(

Huh?
Lamens terms, plz... so the rest of us can understand what this means for PS

BTW, i\'d guess they\'ll only release the code when the game is finished; which it isn\'t, obviously... :rolleyes:

the source code, considering it\'s an open source project, is always attainable (and released) ...in PS\'s case, and most other open source projets, it\'s attainable both via the CVS reporsitory and released on the web (in PS\'s and most cases on sourceforge.net)

more laymen\'s terms:
under the current liscense the code is attainable by other programmers/devellopers but the content (such as models, music, storyline, etc etc) are not available to be used in another project

(or at least I think that\'s how it goes)

[Vengeance]

The GPL code base will compile and run with the artwork also included in the cvs repository just fine.  You just can\'t play PS with it.  The GPL does not cover content--only code.  Others are free to make their own games with their own content and use our engine as they wish.

Basically, there are two separate products/projects merged into 1 here:  a) The PS engine, which is open source software released under GPL, using LGPL libraries like Crystal Space, and b) The PS game itself, which is a free (no charge) set of content which is used by the engine to make a game playable by all who wish to.  The \"b\" part, the game, is proprietary to us.
 
Thank you for your concern.

- Vengeance

[zaphar]

Heh I was gonna post the same thing but it sounds better coming from a Developer. Content is not Code.

Just because I write a Novel using OpenOffice.Org doesn\'t mean I have to release the novel for free. Content is seperate from the Engine and can indeed be under a separate license with no legal problems.