Cube for Debian?

[Linas Zvirblis]

Miriam Ruiz wrote:

>> Yes, there are. The engine itself seems to be free (zlib license with 
>> additional clause that forbids relicensing), but...
>
> Is that DFSG free? I guess so.

It never hurts to double check on debian-legal.

>> 1. The binaries distributed by the author are NOT built from the 
>> available source. They have different networking code, so you cannot 
>> connect to a server that uses the binaries with a client built from source.
>
> Then I guess the package we made shouldn't be called cube, as that might be
> confusing to users. Is the server code also free? If it is, then we should
> consider packaging it too.

The server code is released under the same license. It is (or at least 
was) also possible to connect to a server build from source using a 
binary client.

>> 2. Almost every texture, sound file etc. is released under different 
>> non-free license.
>
> Then we can forget about them. Could it be a possibility to get free textures
> and sounds for repacement in these kind of games?

I guess it is possible to reuse work of some free project (Nexuiz comes 
to mind), but doing this properly can be _very_ hard and time consuming.

> Is it a nice engine? Does it have noticeable differences with other engines?

It provides great performance and visual quality even on older hardware. 
I am not really familiar with how it works, but the result is indeed nice.

> If it is, maybe we should consider packaginf the free stuff (engine) and maybe
> make some example with free textures and sounds, are levels too complex to
> make?
>
> Maybe that could be a way for getting people involved in development of maps,
> textures and games data inside debian, we should start considering creating a
> community of game designers or getting them to the free software, as this
> seems to be a common problem of many games, and there seems to be lots of
> people out there designing levels for quake and so... why not packaging the
> tools and trying to get them involved? I think many of them would be happy to
> have their levels distributed in Debian.

Time spent trying to liberate this game may be worth twice as much 
working on a truly free game, so this should be carefully weighted.

> As an alternative, is all that stuff suitable for being packaged in non-free?

I do not know, but the fact that nobody has done it already is not very 
encouraging.

> I don't like this alternative very much anyway.

Neither do I. Do we really want it that bad?