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DarkPlaces Dev Forest Hale Corrects Nexuiz GPL Stance
Time Doctor writes "There has been a lot of information going around about Nexuiz, the GPL, and what the Nexuiz leadership has done. A new interview has gone up with DarkPlaces developer Forest Hale to set things straight. Quoting: 'The original plan was to contact every developer and relicense the Nexuiz 2.5.2 GPL gamecode sources for this title, to ensure authentic gameplay and return some important features to the community for the benefit of everyone. However this gamecode re-licensing attempt did not go well; with the former developers making claims of violations there was no choice but to re-implement the gamecode from scratch on non-GPL sources. As a result there will be no ongoing code contributions back to the community, and the gameplay may differ more than originally planned. This is a very unfortunate outcome but has no significant impact on development. To make this perfectly clear – the game is being reimplemented from scratch; all they share is a name.'"
Because otherwise, you know, derivative work, and a thousand years bad juju.
Given what they just tried to do, and the casual disregard they had for licensing until they got caught in the act, I'd say the burden of proof lies with the re-implementors.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Money that could have been used to do proper marketing, QA, etc for the game is now wasted on reimplementing it from scratch.
Sad panda :(
To be fair those freaks were the contributors who wrote the code under the expectation that the codebase will remain free throughout all revisions. When I intend for my work to be used in ANY project, including closed source ones I mark it PD, not GPL.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The only reason the GPL version of Nexuiz can't be used on Xbox and Sony is because those platforms have draconian licensing requirements.
The fact that the GPL makes it impossible to deliver the code on those platforms means it is working as intended. As an open source developer, I have no interest in supporting those platforms; if those kinds of platforms catch on, all software development is in deep trouble.
I've no doubt that will work out just fine. It always does.
uhm, not. they wouldn't even contribute in the first place if it was not a gpl source base, and the game would not probably exists in the form it is right now.
they choose gpl, they gather the contribution under the premises of making it better fir everyone in the community, then try to change the licence and keep the proceedings for themselves going after xbla and ps3n - it was obvious that contributors who originally put their effort in the "community" are now pissed at them bagging their work up and changing the licence so that any other couldn't benefit anymore from the advancement in the source code.
'the codebase'? I don't know why you would have that expectation.
You can have that expectation with regard to your own contributed code if you contributed that under the GPL license.
But if - and I'm not saying that's what THIS company did, but none of the sources seem to be particularly unbiased in this - a company decides that they want to make a version of the product under a different license which is incompatible with the GPL, decide to write to all of the developers asking if -their- code may be re-licensed, and let's say 80% agree to this leaving the company with having to re-write (see some earlier comment about 'clean room' and another about viral natures and whatnots) the works contributed by the other 20%... then I don't think that 20% can cry foul in any way.
Maybe that's something that will be addressed in a future version of the GPL, though ;)
using the term "Free Software" is implying that someone sides with the FSF and GPL over other open source licenses.
No, the term "free software" implies the four freedoms, nothing more, nothing less. There's lots of pubic domain and BSD-ware which is called free software (eg. Chromium, Postgres, BSD itself). If you're trying to draw a line between free software and open source, the line has already been drawn.
It's just going to be another uninspired, derivative, run-of-the-mill arena shooter you played to death 10 years ago.
Summation 2
Agreed. At least with Xonotic most people have a chance of being able to pronounce it correctly.
"Nexeeus" my arse.
I do not see the problem in offering dual licensing. It would solve this debate and all this discussion once and for all.
If it already has replacement art and audio, and now it appears will have replacement code as well, at what point does it stop being the same game? Nexuiz may be popular by FOSS game standards, but realistically I don't think it's popular enough that the branding will give the console releases any significant head start. If anything, now that their original dual-licensing plans have been foiled (regardless of whether that is for better or worse), IMHO they would be better off distancing themselves from the original and the surrounding controversy.
Give the domain back, come up with a new name, move on, end of story.
Essentially, they tried that and it didn't work. Hale doesn't have copyright on all the code in current GPL Nexuiz, and wasn't able to obtain it from all contributors. IANAL, but as I understand it the rule of thumb is that you can't re-license something if you aren't the copyright holder.
That's the thing - the original troll poster is calling that 20% "GPL freaks ruining everything".
Let's face it - this is about the only way it could have worked out. It's not like Mesa where the contributors agreed to a relicensing because it was from GPL to another open-source license - it was an attempt to take a GPL work closed, and if I were one of those contributors, I would have been in that 20%.
It is too bad that the licensing for console SDKs prevents them from ever being used for a console port of a GPL game, even if the porter is a full-blown console licensee.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Interesting comment LordHavoc makes about the state of console gaming.
Honestly, attempting to bring a fast-paced shooter like Nexuiz to a console is going to fail and fail miserably - there is a reason "slow-paced" shooters are more popular on consoles - fast-paced shooters require a fast and precise control mechanism (mouse + keyboard), console control mechanisms are neither of these. (Which is why I don't play console-based shooters.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I mostly agre... Is true, this type of gameplay was popular 10 years ago.
Nowdays? no soo much.. and on the console is almost nowhere to be seen.
People is free to make whatever want, and this type of comunities want Quake3-like games, so thats what you get. If you don't like that, get a compiler and make a fork.
-Woof woof woof!
If 20 % of the code could not be relicensed, then that 20 percent has to be re-written from scratch in a clean-room style.
Anything else, and the contributors of that 20% should cry foul.
Remember, if there's one line of proprietary code in the linux kernel, Microsoft can cry foul. Why not expect the same for people in the closed source world?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The PC market is much bigger. The problem here is that is moving to digital, where is invisible to the usual metric systems. Also is "multishape", games like FarmVille get 80 millions. How much million play most console games? on the PC, you have to count webgames, flashgames, casual games, indie games, open source games... not everything shows on a phisic shop, since most are online transactions.
-Woof woof woof!
He can't really say that the original plan was to contact every developer, the deal was made in complete and absolute secret. Not a single developer knew about the Nexuiz deal, not a single notification was sent, most of us knew about it when we saw the the homepage was changed, only providing a small link to "Nexuiz GPL" at the bottom.
In my opinion there is no way to consider that this deal was morally right, there was people who were contributing code on a daily basis for *years*, the least you will expect is to get some sort of notification if someone is about to make money out of your hard work. In other words what they done is just stealing.
And of course they must rewrite the whole Nexuiz codebase now, that's the only way for them to prevent getting sued. Not to mention that after the deal was made public there was no dialog *at all* between Lee Vermeulen (the owner of Nexuiz) and the developers, there was no attempt at all to fix what they done (again, stealing), mostly because you actually need to talk in order to fix things.
That was the very reason because the Xonotic project was born, we as developers just can't trust Alientrap (which is only Lee Vermeulen) anymore.
It's sad that LH now makes it look like thanks to the unreasonable (ex)developers of Nexuiz now there will be no improvements flowing back to GPL Nexuiz. I don't know you but I'm getting used to his bursts of insulting statements.
Remember, if there's one line of proprietary code in the linux kernel, Microsoft can cry foul.
The Linux kernel does contain proprietary code in it in the form of firmware blobs. And Microsoft couldn't say shit unless it could be proven to be their own code and they didn't allow redistribution and use of said code.
Isn't this one of the main bones of contention though? The www.nexuiz.com URL no longer takes you to the GPL project it used to, it displays a page about Illfonic's new console game and there's a tiny link in the corner of the page that takes you to the original project page!
Couldn't they have used a different name for what is, essentially, a different game?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." -Pravin Lal
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Let's face it - this is about the only way it could have worked out. It's not like Mesa where the contributors agreed to a relicensing because it was from GPL to another open-source license - it was an attempt to take a GPL work closed, and if I were one of those contributors, I would have been in that 20%.
It appears that Hale was intending to contribute some of the changes/improvements from the console version back to the community in the event of a successful relicensing. However since the relicense attempt didn't work out it looks like any improvements that result from the necessary rewrite of code that can't be carried forward will not be contributed back to the GPL version.
While the original contributors who were unwilling to relicense their GPL contributions were well within their rights, making a stink about violations merely as a result of being asked about relicensing does sort of come across as skulking about whilst croaking "My precioussss!!! Filthy, tricksy Hale-Bagginses tried to steal my precious."
So Hale *says* they are going to contribute back *some* of their changes to the community in an effort to get the developers to play ball and give away the rights to their code. Does this really sound like a good deal to you? That's the whole point of the GPL, you get to use the GPL'ed work in exchange for not locking your contributions to it down when you distribute them. Why would someone give up the legal protections on their work in exchange for a vague promise that an unspecified amount of changes would be contributed back to the community?
The company has NO incentive at that point to actually DO what they've promised, so it is very likely that as soon as it got inconvenient/expensive to keep contributing, they would just stop or strongly curtail their contributions. I'm not saying that they would be wrong to do this mind you, what I am saying is that companies are in general NOT altruistic, so it's generally going to be a bad idea to make any kind of deal with them that does not involve external coercion of some kind (in this case the threat of a GPL violation lawsuit).
One thing this made me think of, in a way advanced DVCSs (git, darcs, generally I'm thinking of patch-oriented version control systems) are two-edged, because they DO allow a much greater ability to pull code back out of the project if you were to have the rights to most, but not all of the codebase. Also they tend to track attribution of patches more accurately than say svn. Wonder how hard it would be to craft a, "remove every patch attributed to author x" command in git...
I say two-edged, because this kind of thing would also be useful in forking a project with mixed licensing in an attempt to make it "freer" (whatever that means from the perspective of the forkers) or to try to work around pantent-encumbered code.
Absolutely - but they shouldn't cry foul if indeed the code from those 20% -was- re-implemented in a proper manner.
Basically, if I contribute to a GPL project and then later on somebody manages to convince the other developers to allow them to re-license the code, then I shouldn't throw a hissy fit going "If I knew you guys were going to allow it to be re-licensed, away from the GPL philosophy, I would NEVER have contributed my code!"
I could, and some developers *might*.. but, again, there's no real -expectancy- that just because the project is GPL today it will forevermore be GPL.
Nexuiz as it exists (GPL cross platform FPS, v 2.5.2) will continue to be developed by the community.
The 'new' Nexuiz is a closed source, re-implemented version of GNexuiz that only shares the name and the 'style' of the original.
Correct?
Rather than relicensing to proprietary or BSD, an exception can be made to the GPL allowing the game to be compiled with a closed SDK, lots of GPL'd code have exceptions for such cases.
But... the future refused to change.
I wanted to contribute back but the license requires me to! Would you please allow me to not give anything back so I can start to generously contribute back?
*sigh*...happens every time someone complains about the GPL...
But... the future refused to change.
Pardon me, but I just have to laugh at this gem that manages to claim that "free software" is so much clearer than "open source software"
However, the obvious meaning for the expression open source softwareand the one most people seem to think it meansis You can look at the source code.
The term free software has two natural meanings, one of which is the intended meaning, so a person who has grasped the idea of free speech, not free beer will not get it wrong again.
I just have to ask, why? Free speech is a permission to express yourself, like how the is the GPL different? Can't you express yourself under any open source license? And most speech isn't very copyleft-free, under the Berne convention everything copyrightable is copyrighted unless specifically released. About the only good thing it does is say that it doesn't mean free as in beer - an expression I doubt is very popular among English-speaking in muslim countries - but not much anything else. Try saying to random semi-technical people "Imagine what you think of if I say free software, free as in speech not free as in beer". I think you'd get very strange answers that has very little to do with the four freedoms. I think OSS is much simpler to explain as it is essentially public code everyone can use for any purpose. I've not yet met anyone that has used more than 30 seconds to understand the concept, "free software" on the other hand...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I prefer Warsow as well, bit I see it as potentially having a similar problem to Nexuiz. The ownership of the game name is under the control of one person, and while the code for the game is open source, the media is under a more restrictive license. (The reason for this license is that some media contributors were unwilling to have their work under a share-alike license, so the dev team was forced to adopt the current license to appease them.)
This means that should the owner decide to sell off the game like Nexuiz's owner did, the Warsow community may have a similar problem. It may be even MORE challenging, since any fork of the game would require completely new media, as only the code could be forked. Fortunately, the owner of the Warsow name is actively involved in its development, and seems to be a pretty decent guy in general, so it's unlikely this situation would come to pass. Still, there is that potential danger, which does make some of the community a bit nervous over the state of the game . . .
For that project, I'd recommend they change the media license and remove those parts of the media that certain developers are unwilling to allow under a share-alike license, perhaps putting it in a separate "restrictive" download pack. Not only would this remove the risk of going the route of Nexuiz, but it would appease both the share-alike community and the devs that want a restrictive license.
If they are cloning the game from scratch fine. Wish they could come up with their own ideas and game designs.
But I read bullshit in this. There's no need to share the name if the product is completely different. What's the point? NO matter how you look at it there is no real major points. Change the name already and move on with their new venture.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
And let's not ignore the fact that the original quote was "open source models"
The "original quote" talked about software in general, not just games.
And you can be certain that open source software has made a big contribution to keeping desktop machines general purpose and programmable.
(If your interpretation of a statement contradicts the facts, you should realize that often the problem is with your interpretation, not with the original statement.)
No, you didn't understand. The problem isn't on the GPL side, here. It's on the console SDK side (which is why the poster to whom you replied explained that even BSD licensed code is a no-no).
So they should give all their rights up in return for a promise? How about you sign a job contract binding you to work 80 hours a week for 5$ an hour in return for a promise of really big bonuses. Promises dont count. Contracts and licenses do. Besides, llfonic's representative clearly stated they had no plans to contribute anything back.