Bug#461659: warsow: New version of warsow possibly non-distributable.

Andres Mejia mcitadel at gmail.com
Tue Jan 22 05:48:37 UTC 2008


On Jan 21, 2008 5:16 PM, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> wrote:
>
> Vincent Fourmond wrote:
> >   Hello,
> >
> > Andres Mejia wrote:
> >>    2. Terms defined in this Article, and parenthetically elsewhere,
> >> shall throughout this License have the meanings here and there
> >> provided. Defined terms may be used in the singular or plural.
> >> Definitions:
> >>
> >>       � The "Material", below, refers to any such material or work,
> >> and a "work based on the Material" means either the Material or any
> >> Derivative Work under copyright law.
> >>
> >>       � "Derivative Work" shall mean a work containing the Material or
> >> a portion of it, such as a revision, modification, enhancement,
> >> adaptation, translation (including compilation or recompilation by
> >> computer), abridgement, condensation, expansion, or any other form in
> >> which such preexisting works may be recast, transformed, or adapted,
> >> and that, if prepared without authorization of the owner of the
> >> copyright in such preexisting work, would constitute a copyright
> >> infringement.
> >>
> >>       � Each licensee is addressed as "you".
> >>
> >>    3. You may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, sell, participate
> >> in the transfer or sale or reproduce, create Derivative Works from,
> >> distribute, perform, display or in any way exploit any of the Material
> >> released under this License unless expressly permitted by the Warsow
> >> Team.
> >>
> >>    4. You may freely distribute the Warsow archive/installer
> >> unmodified on any media. You may re-compress using different archival
> >> formats suitable for your OS (i.e. zip/tgz/rpm/deb/dmg), any changes
> >> beyond that require explicit permission of the Chasseur de bots
> >> association.
> >>
> >> Clause 3 of this license goes against clauses 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8 of the
> >> Open Source Definition (and thus the DFSG). This to me most likely
> >> makes the new version of warsow unsuitable for distribution through
> >> Debian.
> >
> >   Completely agree. That also excludes distributing in non-free, because
> > 'modification' includes compilation according to clause 2. So its either
> > a binary repackaged blurb or nothing. Better it be nothing. You probably
> > should tag the new upstream version bug as wontfix.
> >
>
> 1) This is the content license only, the engine is GPL
> 2) Even then I agree the new license is bad, has anyone actually tried
>     contacting upstream and kindly asking them to change the license back,
>     or otherwise improve their licensing scheme?
>
> Regards,
>
> Hans

Yes, this only refers to the content license.

I was thinking of contacting upstream about this issue, but somehow I
think upstream is not going to entertain any discussion about the new
license anytime soon, especially since they recently changed their
license because of an issue with one artist's maps (related to bug
#441435).

Reading the license.txt file for the new warsow also made me feel as
though I would be wasting my time trying to contact upstream about
this.

I did a search on the keyword "license" in their forums and after
reading http://www.warsow.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=15145 , I've
decided not to contact upstream about this.

If anyone else wishes to contact upstream, feel free.

-- 
Regards,
Andres Mejia


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