Fwd: Parallel Realities Games have non-free content

[Miriam Ruiz]

Forwarding this mail from the Fedora Games Mailing List, just in case.

This probably means that the game starfighter might need to have some
of its graphics replaced or to be removed from the archive and the
others (blobwars, blobandconquer and viruskiller) might have need to
have music and sounds removed/replaced. We might want to have a look
on what Fedora does with those packages.

blobandconquer's copyright file says:
All music and sound effects contained within this game are taken from various
freely accessible internet websites. In all cases this music and sound is
assumed to be placed within the public domain and therefore free to distribute.
[Parallel Realities] accepts no responsibility for audio contain herein that
was made freely available without the consent of the owner.  All character
names used within the game are copyright and/or trademarks of the respective
owners. They are not in any way associated with either Blob Wars: Blob and
Conquer or Parallel Realities.

blobwars' copyright file says:
All music and sound effects contained within this game are taken from various
freely accessible internet websites. In all cases this music and sound is
assumed to be placed within the public domain and therefore free to distribute.
[Parallel Realities] accepts no responsibility for audio contain herein that
was made freely available without the consent of the owner.  All character
names used within the game are copyright and/or trademarks of the respective
owners. They are not in any way associated with either Blob Wars : Metal Blob
Solid or Parallel Realities.

viruskiller and starfighter don't even mention it in theri copyright files.

starfighter source in Debian doesn't seem to include any sound files
anyway, but some of its graphics contents might come from an unknown
source.

Any thoughts on this?

Greetings,
Miry

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl>
Date: 2008/8/18
Subject: Re: Parallel Realities Games have non-free content
To: Fedora Games <fedora-games-list at redhat.com>
Cc: matthias at rpmforge.net


Tom spot Callaway wrote:
>
> Recently, it has come to light that all Parallel Realities games were knowingly using and including non-free content (graphics, audio, etc).
>
> See: http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4725&highlight=
>
> Accordingly, we need to block these packages from Fedora:
>
> blobwars
> blobAndConquer
> starfighter
> viruskiller
>

Ok I've been in contact with upstream about this and I got the
following list from them of resources which they got from various
places and they thus cannot give any license guarantees about:

For Blob Wars,

All Music
All Sound Effects

For Blob And Conquer

All Music
All Sound Effects

For Virus Killer

All Music
All Sound Effects

For Project: Starfighter
All Music
All Sound Effects
Character Portraits
Starfighter (and other spacecraft) images


My plan is to issue updates for blobwars and blobAndConquer removing
music and sounds (and patching source as necessary to not crash when
these are missing).

Then I'll be replacing the music which is all mod / xm / s3m with
modtracker files from modarchive.org which only contains freely
(re)distributable modtracker files (license already approved by Spot).

Last I will be replacing the sound effects with sound effects from
other free games in Fedora, mainly freedoom, nexuiz, tremulous,
opearena and worminator.

I'll do the same for viruskiller as that one is from Matthias, and
Matthias seems to have little time for Fedora lately.

Project starfighter will have to be removed until we can fix the
graphics issue, I've contacted Nicu and Marin asking them if they can
maybe do some replacement graphics for starfighter.

Regards,

Hans

p.s.

As I still have quite a bit webcam work todo before the F10 beta for
now I'll only be removing the sounds / music, adding replacements is
something which I will do in a later update. In the mean time any help
with this would be much appreciated, if you want to help please drop
me a mail to coordinate.