Upcoming Music and Art licensing changes

[pyndragon]

Warning: Wall of text ahead.

Nice wording, reading this was actually quite fun! I´m admittedly no radical open source advocate, but I think after all the stuff I noticed about in just the short time I´m part of the forums, this is a really good step forward.

Thanks for the kind words, was a little worried that the length would be off-putting.

He's probably referring to ambiguity in what "Non Commercial" actually means. There was a ruling in Germany which interpreted NC as meaning "personal use only".

Ok, I actually wasn't aware of that. I'll need to do some more research, but I'll try to get a blurb about that into the eventual Wiki page.

To be clear: Vultraz was not the author. He simply copy-and-pasted the article. Pydesigner was the original author.

I think that's pretty clear from the heading of the post.

As I read it, the idea was to cut off at no more restrictive than CC-BY-SA.

In other words, as I read it, so long as there is no restriction on commercial use, or upon the creation and/or distribution of derivative works, the license should be acceptable.

Um... No? The expectation is that mainline assets will be BY or BY-SA, not that any such restriction will be placed on the add-on server.

Remember, please, none of this applies to the original author/creator. The original author's right to offer differing licenses to different parties cannot be restricted. In other words, for example, should the creator decide to offer a license to someone using CC-BY (or any other license) but license the work for Wesnoth's use under CC-BY-SA, that is totally up to the creator and Wesnoth's policies cannot prevent it.

Yes, it's definitely true that extra constraints and allowances can be applied to a CC license (it explicitly allows this); however, I don't think it will be generally acceptable for a mainline asset to be CC licensed only for mainline usage.

The point of confusion, most likely, is there is a difference between the license granted TO Wesnoth, and the license granted others deriving from having obtained the work FROM Wesnoth. Wesnoth, itself, might find a highly restrictive license such as CC-BY-NC-ND acceptable for the software and servers. But, to avoid confusion, and allow players and other content designers to freely use the work, Pydesigner is advocating that Wesnoth require that WESNOTH be licensed at no more restrictions than CC-BY-SA and that that license be PASSED THROUGH to players and other content creators.

Hmm? There won't be such a difference, and cannot be, unless explicitly noted by the artist.

Finally, it needs to be made clear that we're talking about visual and audio works. Programming code such as WML, C++, Lua, Python, shell or yaml scripts will remain licensed under the more highly-restrictive GPL terms.

I'm pretty confident that everything in the post clearly refers to art already.

The intention is to make it clear that a content creator can, for example, use a CC-BY-SA licensed audio track obtained THROUGH Wesnoth, alone or with other works, modified or not, without requiring the provision of the full Wesnoth source-code package, as required by the GPL.

Well, yes, of course, and this has always been the case.

I guess my question then is: Why are NC and ND allowed for the add-on server?

I'm not a lawyer, so if there aren't any concerns about NC being problematic, then I don't see any real objections to that one.

For ND though, that seems a bit more problematic. Partially because I don't particularly like the idea of being able to forbid people from frankensteining, and partially because our ability to actually enforce this is pretty low anyway.

I think an advisory to UMC authors to be very careful to get explicit usage consent from any NC asset creators they might want to use should suffice; that court ruling seems a bit ridiculous but I'd hate to see any of our creators similarly blindsided.

ND assets are a bit more nuanced. There are pre-existing assets under the CC BY-ND that we'd be able to use (here's a set I found last night from OpenGameArt: https://samanthafoster.bandcamp.com/alb ... -bag-vol-1). There are artists who prefer working under the CC BY-ND, especially musicians. And there are artists who, quite bluntly, don't want their art frankensteined. Not everyone cares about that, but for the ones that do, does it really make sense that some potential future frankensteiner is more important than the original creator? I'd rather have enough good art that frankensteining becomes much less prevalent.

I find myself in general agreement with the idea and believe it should move forward.

First, let's all agree it's worthy of consideration. Having that, we can argue where, exactly, the most-restrictive line should be drawn.

Let me take this opportunity to point out that the OP here is not a suggestion. It's a request for comments and feedback on a change that is happening. Only due to lack of time on vultraz's part is there not a corresponding front page announcement.

So, Pydesigner's suggestion is to Keep It Simple: everything is the same non-restrictive license.

Again, I don't know where you're getting this.

I start to envision a Wesnoth Resources download site. In it you can find every image, audio track, whatever .. just not the code. Each as a license attached. Derivatives all have links to the work they derive from. The software package has a LICENSE file which says everything you see or hear is licensed; you cannot use them from this download; to use them you must go to the resources site, click to accept the license and download a copy for your use.

An interesting idea, but both a lot of work and well outside the scope of this particular effort.

the only people likely to realistically know how a particular asset is licensed is the person who made it, regardless of whether a LICENSE or .license file is included, so keeping things to the more open CC licenses would decrease the chance of any sort of "accidental" infringement.

Honestly, I'm not sure if we're currently even fulfilling the requirements of the GPL. It's really easy to just lift art off the forum and not even think about the licensing, since the uploader applies it for you. I'm of the opinion that forcing people to think a little more about the art they use is very much a good thing. Note also that the CC requires, as part of attribution, a link to the source of the asset. If someone is violating the CC and lying about it, all that must be done is check the link or for an absence of said link.

2. I have reservations about allowing "any CC license" on the add-on server. I'm inclined to suggest, only "share-alike" licenses. At least that is the simplest most incremental change that we can make -- the share-alike aspect is pretty important to the project right now, everyone agrees that frankensteining and mix-and-matching assets that were posted on the website or add-on server is okay, and we would have to make some more explicit headsup for the users I think if that was no longer going to be automatically okay.

Small incremental change would have been fine 6 years ago. I'm not interested in watching this absolutely critical process get bogged down.

3. One possibility I would suggest is, we could have two sections within the add-on server for "share-alike" and "non-share-alike" (any-CC) addons or something like this. So people know clearly what addons they can reuse assets from and which ones they have to be careful about, and also it will raise awareness of the difference (which many users may not appreciate).

I've suggested elsewhere that we add a key to the _server.pbl that could be used to enumerate the licenses on the assets within each add-on.

4. One of the issues which was raised in IRC was, what if people want to commission artists to make sprites specifically for their addon, and they want to release it under a license which won't allow other addon makers to use it, to preserve the uniqueness of their add-on. It was also suggested that some artists prefer to release their art under an ND license. I think at the time, the proposal was "any license" not "any CC license" -- if you release art under CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC then I guess someone else can use it in their addon as long as they don't change it etc. Would like to hear from the folks who were advocating the "any license" idea way back when if they are also happy with this version of the proposal.

IMO decisions like this should be made on the basis of what is best for the overall health of the project rather than personal preferences about open source philosophies etc.

The OP is the work of three individuals based on first-hand experience in administration, add-on creation, art contribution, and development. This isn't about personal preference, this is about reviving asset contribution to Wesnoth.

I guess it's my hope right now that we [...] will stick to a "everything share-alike" model, b/c it seems more egalitarian and a little simpler.

Not changing is usually simpler. I don't think empowering artists is less egalitarian. I do think maintaining the status quo would be.

These licensing issues are longstanding and a major agenda item of the newly elected board, so you can expect some movement in the near future I think.

I'll quote myself from GitHub here:

The purpose here is to focus on the community first and foremost; the developers are mentioned because they control merges, and the administrators on account of moderating the add-on servers. You might find licensing of commissions a worthy subject for a separate post, but this change doesn't actually affect the board directly.

[Pentarctagon]

For ND though, that seems a bit more problematic. Partially because I don't particularly like the idea of being able to forbid people from frankensteining, and partially because our ability to actually enforce this is pretty low anyway.

ND assets are a bit more nuanced. There are pre-existing assets under the CC BY-ND that we'd be able to use (here's a set I found last night from OpenGameArt: https://samanthafoster.bandcamp.com/alb ... -bag-vol-1). There are artists who prefer working under the CC BY-ND, especially musicians. And there are artists who, quite bluntly, don't want their art frankensteined. Not everyone cares about that, but for the ones that do, does it really make sense that some potential future frankensteiner is more important than the original creator? I'd rather have enough good art that frankensteining becomes much less prevalent.

Honestly, and maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic here, I don't see there ever being enough good art that frankensteining becomes much less prevalent. Good art is made by people who are skilled enough to create their own from scratch, and frankensteining is, generally, done by those who are not. So even if allowing CC BY-ND would, by itself, open up Wesnoth UMC (since the announcement states that mainline won't be accepting *-ND) to even more artists to be noticeable compared to not allowing CC BY-ND, chances are that they will be making art for their own interests and projects. Frankensteining, on the other hand, is taking taking from existing work and patching it together to suit your own needs more exactly. So allowing CC BY-ND seems to me like it won't contribute to frankensteining being less necessary, it will just mean that there will be a pool of art that can't be reused by people who would otherwise want to use it to create something the fits their needs better than something someone else made for some other purpose.

So I suppose what I'm saying, is that *-ND doesn't seem like it would cause any harm, but I also don't really see there being a huge benefit to it either. It may result in more art being created by Wesnoth UMC, which would be good; but any art that does get created is essentially unalterable, which at least to me is a negative.

edit
---

the only people likely to realistically know how a particular asset is licensed is the person who made it, regardless of whether a LICENSE or .license file is included, so keeping things to the more open CC licenses would decrease the chance of any sort of "accidental" infringement.

Honestly, I'm not sure if we're currently even fulfilling the requirements of the GPL. It's really easy to just lift art off the forum and not even think about the licensing, since the uploader applies it for you. I'm of the opinion that forcing people to think a little more about the art they use is very much a good thing. Note also that the CC requires, as part of attribution, a link to the source of the asset. If someone is violating the CC and lying about it, all that must be done is check the link or for an absence of said link.

And I agree that making people think a little but more about licensing is a good thing, if only to better familiarize themselves with where all the assets come from, but I also think you are over-estimating how much thought people will actually care to put into it. It seems likely to me that, for many people, "which version of CC did all these pieces of art use, and what does that mean for me?" would end up falling into the same category of question as "have you read this EULA?"

Or, to put it another way: It would be great if we could force people to put more thought into the licensing of the assets they want to use, but I doubt many people care enough about these types of legal details to actually put that level of thought into it without first having to be called out by an admin/developer/moderator/etc. How many people end up following the terms of the licenses of the assets they use will, I think, be down more to random chance. And yeah, that's pretty stupid, but it also means we shouldn't create a system that expects people will put more effort into the licensing/legal aspect than can be reasonably assumed.

[pyndragon]

So I suppose what I'm saying, is that *-ND doesn't seem like it would cause any harm, but I also don't really see there being a huge benefit to it either. It may result in more art being created by Wesnoth UMC, which would be good; but any art that does get created is essentially unalterable, which at least to me is a negative.

Your experience may be different than mine, but from what I've seen, almost all franks are either based off of mainline content, or made by people in the forum who specifically ask permission to make the frank in the art production thread. I also think that the BY-ND will appeal more to external contract artists rather than existing forum artists.

[vultraz]

While I can see and understand the points against CC licenses other than SA, I feel they don't outweigh the benefits to an extent that would necessitate a ban on non-SA use.

It is not impossible for modders to care about licensing and permission for use of assets; in fact, the entire Skyrim modding community takes this very seriously, and the permissions granted by fellow modders regarding their assets is taken seriously. While it may be true that Wesnoth has had a historically free-for-all attitude towards its assets, I second pyndragon's point that making UMC authors more aware to what they use is better. In fact, I would go as far as to say it will improve access to certain assets; having clear attribution can lead new UMC authors to discover more, similar art or music to make use of in their own creations.

I might also stress this is an all-or-nothing change. We are not going to do this in incremental steps. To do so would be pointless and honestly just complicate things further for us and users. It's also important that this be done now, since 1.14 and a Steam release looms on the horizon

[Iris]

Hi, third (and original) person behind the proposal speaking here.

In all likelihood, most original add-on content will continue to be free (GNU GPL v2+, CC BY, or CC BY-SA), especially any content produced by creators for whom eligibility for mainline inclusion is a goal or concern — we’ll certainly never allow non-free (CC BY-NC/ND and combinations thereof) content in mainline. The ability to include assets under non-free licenses in add-ons is intended primarily as a convenience for authors who want to use extra content that wasn’t developed specifically for Wesnoth, primarily music and non-sprite art. While using existing non-free sprites is certainly not out of the question, I don’t see that turning out to be particularly advantageous for anyone involved given Wesnoth’s comparatively unique visuals and tile geometry; so in that regard, people should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot aesthetically-speaking if they want. As for creating new non-free sprites, it is a choice for (UMC) artists to make and I don’t see why we should keep forcing them to comply with the existing free-for-all anarchy scheme if they truly don’t want to. Overall, I don’t believe that frankensteining as a practice is going to be significantly impacted by any of this, and certainly not the frankensteining of generic unit art that is clearly intended to be frankensteined. In the unlikely event that we get a shortage of UMC franken bases, those who choose to be more charitable and license their sprites under a free license so that they get reused everywhere will benefit more from the increased recognition of their talent than those who license their work under non-free licenses; in other words, free licenses will continue to be the norm for a majority of the community’s output for purely practical reasons (and also because mainline will continue to use those licenses and a large share of UMC assets are based on mainline content).

As for people getting confused by all of this, I’d like to think that if content creators can somehow find their way to the PblWML page on the wiki, they can also understand some basic principles of common sense and etiquette, and pay attention to the licenses under which an add-on’s assets are provided. Naturally, we will also provide them with a simpler list of do’s and don’ts. Either way, this is primarily a concern for existing members of the community rather than new members; for new members, this is likely one of the few civilized places on the Internet where taking art from other add-ons without asking or formally crediting sources is somehow considered acceptable.

The reason I’m backing this (and partially originated it) as content creator and artist is that, much like pydsigner and vultraz, I’ve found myself limited in my ability to produce content way too many times due to most available stock music and sound effects being provided under licenses other than the GNU GPL v2+ or CC0/PD. I don’t think I can put into words how utterly frustrating it is to hit these road blocks every time you are trying to create something that can stand out as its own thing without using the same music that all other 2,000 user-created and mainline scenarios feature all the time, or half-assedly mashing together existing sound effects and pretend that it somehow fits whatever you are trying to do. It’s also not all that great when you put your work out there for free and it winds up bundled in a commercial version of the game without your express permission (or simply because you cannot, legally, deny or revoke that permission granted by a license that was forced on you) and you aren’t given a single cent for it. I’m quite certain that many people have a stable enough income and little emotional attachment to their art and the energy they put into it that they don’t mind any of this, but for those of us who care, it is a perfectly valid reason to decide to invest our time in other places or activities than creating content for Wesnoth.

[Pentarctagon]

Alright then, I'm glad to see this moving forward

I might also stress this is an all-or-nothing change. We are not going to do this in incremental steps. To do so would be pointless and honestly just complicate things further for us and users. It's also important that this be done now, since 1.14 and a Steam release looms on the horizon

Do you mean just the initial setup of allowing non-GPL content on the add-on server, or is the intention to complete all the steps outlined in the Proposal section before Steam/1.14?

[pyndragon]

Do you mean just the initial setup of allowing non-GPL content on the add-on server, or is the intention to complete all the steps outlined in the Proposal section before Steam/1.14?

The default forum license is the only change that I would see potentially occurring after 1.14. There's already a PR to change the upload agreement message for the add-on server, while accepting CC content in mainline is just a policy change. I would expect to see existing mainline content begin relicensing in the near future, but that is more of a long-running task which may never be completed depending on whether or not all of the original artists can be reached.

And I agree that making people think a little but more about licensing is a good thing, if only to better familiarize themselves with where all the assets come from, but I also think you are over-estimating how much thought people will actually care to put into it. It seems likely to me that, for many people, "which version of CC did all these pieces of art use, and what does that mean for me?" would end up falling into the same category of question as "have you read this EULA?"

Or, to put it another way: It would be great if we could force people to put more thought into the licensing of the assets they want to use, but I doubt many people care enough about these types of legal details to actually put that level of thought into it without first having to be called out by an admin/developer/moderator/etc. How many people end up following the terms of the licenses of the assets they use will, I think, be down more to random chance. And yeah, that's pretty stupid, but it also means we shouldn't create a system that expects people will put more effort into the licensing/legal aspect than can be reasonably assumed.

I think there's a difference though, between reading a 20 page EULA that you already basically know what it says (we still own this software and you can't sue us if it breaks your computer) as well as which no-one can really check to see if you actually read, and reading a 4-line blurb that tells you whether or not you can modify a piece of art. It may take time for our culture to adapt, but we do have add-on server admins and if add-ons start getting deleted based on licensing violations, there'll be more impetus to do the 3 minutes of homework necessary to abide by the rules.

[iceiceice]

2. I have reservations about allowing "any CC license" on the add-on server. I'm inclined to suggest, only "share-alike" licenses. At least that is the simplest most incremental change that we can make -- the share-alike aspect is pretty important to the project right now, everyone agrees that frankensteining and mix-and-matching assets that were posted on the website or add-on server is okay, and we would have to make some more explicit headsup for the users I think if that was no longer going to be automatically okay.

Small incremental change would have been fine 6 years ago. I'm not interested in watching this absolutely critical process get bogged down.

Well you know, it's not really about you, it's about everybody. It doesn't really matter what you are "interested in".

I'm not at all convinced that this proposal is "absolutely critical" or that it will even make a big difference in terms of "reviving UMC" as you claimed. The project has been around for 12 years, we've never had a similar proposal, or any similar threads. Many of the developers especially who posted on your github PR felt that CC-BY-SA is closer to the spirit of the project and weren't enthusiastic about your proposal. (Back then it was "allow any license on the add-on server").

If you asked me back then I would have been totally opposed to anything other than CC-BY-SA.

In some other discussions on side channels, I've come around. My stance now is more practical: even if "share-alike" is historically the spirit of the project, we should do what is best for the health of the project going forward.

1. The worst thing that could happen from this realistically is, add-on makers get confused, get angry at eachother, and we have to sort out a bunch of messes. There are actually *a lot* of different CC licenses and which ones are compatible is not always straightforward to understand, there are large tables and such on the CC website, but licensing questions can get really horrible and nuanced, especially in regards to judgments of when something is or isn't a derivative work. When we only had one license there's a lot less room for confusion.

2. If we do this and regret it, it will be quite painful to go back, we would have to tell people that certain licenses that they were using aren't allowed anymore.

3. I think the most important thing is that the change is very well executed. It's not really enough that there be a little text file in the add-on saying what content has what licenses, there should be a UI indicator in the add-on server window that summarizes the licensing status of an add-on. Especially whether all the content is share-alike or not, so that people who aren't savvy about licensing issues (the majority of our users) can know at a glance if it is okay to franken anything from a given add-on, or if they might be better to double-check with someone.

If we aren't going to commit to making a nice and well thought out system like this for 1.14 to minimize confusion (which would not be too much work I think), then IMO we should definitely wait until 1.16, or just go with CC-BY-SA for now.

If you can provide some evidence that allowing any license, or any CC license, would in fact "revive asset contribution to wesnoth" it might change my position, but right now it just sounds like rhetoric to me.

If things are clearly marked this way, then I'm really pretty okay with it. After all that's very similar to how Debian and Ubuntu work in regards to "non-free packages".

[pyndragon]

Well you know, it's not really about you, it's about everybody. It doesn't really matter what you are "interested in".

I'm not at all convinced that this proposal is "absolutely critical" or that it will even make a big difference in terms of "reviving UMC" as you claimed. The project has been around for 12 years, we've never had a similar proposal, or any similar threads.

Allow me to suggest that you take a look around the forum, because I'm pretty sure that's not the case. In fact, over 8 years ago Dave specifically requested this sort of a proposal — viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22098&start=105#p309582. Mattias Westlund left over the GPL. I'm not even sure why we still have Timothy Pinkham's music in Wesnoth after he asked us to remove it. Aleksi walked away as well. We literally ran off all our core music contributors. Or read some of the links from the OP. Or go over to OpenGameArt and see them discussing removing GPL support with the only drawback being that Wesnoth is still stuck in the dark ages. This is a Creative Commons art world, and Wesnoth is just living in it.

Many of the developers especially who posted on your github PR felt that CC-BY-SA is closer to the spirit of the project and weren't enthusiastic about your proposal. (Back then it was "allow any license on the add-on server").

Oh look, we changed the wording of everything to strongly encourage the CC BY-SA and disallow arbitrary licenses.

If you asked me back then I would have been totally opposed to anything other than CC-BY-SA.

In some other discussions on side channels, I've come around. My stance now is more practical: even if "share-alike" is historically the spirit of the project, we should do what is best for the health of the project going forward.

Hence the OP.

1. The worst thing that could happen from this realistically is, add-on makers get confused, get angry at eachother, and we have to sort out a bunch of messes. There are actually *a lot* of different CC licenses and which ones are compatible is not always straightforward to understand, there are large tables and such on the CC website, but licensing questions can get really horrible and nuanced, especially in regards to judgments of when something is or isn't a derivative work. When we only had one license there's a lot less room for confusion.

CC0
CC BY
CC BY-SA
CC BY-ND
CC BY-SA-NC
CC BY-ND-NC

Yeah that looks like a lot of licences, but, for Wesnoth, there is only really one major concern — SA or ND. I'm pretty sure all of our creators can understand the difference between "yes, you can modify this" and "no, you can't modify this".

3. I think the most important thing is that the change is very well executed. It's not really enough that there be a little text file in the add-on saying what content has what licenses, there should be a UI indicator in the add-on server window that summarizes the licensing status of an add-on. Especially whether all the content is share-alike or not, so that people who aren't savvy about licensing issues (the majority of our users) can know at a glance if it is okay to franken anything from a given add-on, or if they might be better to double-check with someone.

Again, I've already stated in this thread and elsewhere that we should add a key to the _server.pbl. We're already rewriting the add-on dialog for 1.14 anyways.

If we aren't going to commit to making a nice and well thought out system like this for 1.14 to minimize confusion (which would not be too much work I think), then IMO we should definitely wait until 1.16, or just go with CC-BY-SA for now.

Put this off to 1.16? I think you're the only person who has said anything on this subject who thinks that dealing with this matter can wait.

If you can provide some evidence that allowing any license, or any CC license, would in fact "revive asset contribution to wesnoth" it might change my position, but right now it just sounds like rhetoric to me.

I think I've cited enough sources. Would you like to provide some evidence to the contrary?

[iceiceice]

Yeah that looks like a lot of licences, but, for Wesnoth, there is only really one major concern — SA or ND. I'm pretty sure all of our creators can understand the difference between "yes, you can modify this" and "no, you can't modify this".

Then why not just restrict to SA or ND?

Again, I've already stated in this thread and elsewhere that we should add a key to the _server.pbl. We're already rewriting the add-on dialog for 1.14 anyways.

My concern is the ultimate end user experience, hence, why I put "execution" in bold. A key in _server.pbl is great, but the add-on dialog should actually use that key also, it shouldn't just get fobbed off until 1.16.

Put this off to 1.16? I think you're the only person who has said anything on this subject who thinks that dealing with this matter can wait.

Actually, the only people who spoke in favor of it so far are you, Vultraz, and shadowm, and you also spoke of it 6 months ago. Nothing happened with it then. I suggested that you email the mailing list, or make some polls on the website, and for whatever reason you declined all of those things. You guys have been gradually trying to convince everyone to adopt this change, but I don't know what gave you the impression that I'm the "only one that thinks the matter can wait". If you read the github post for instance, AI0867 doesn't seem to think it needs to happen at all.

And I tend to agree with that sentiment. I don't think it *needs* to happen. But it *might be a good thing* if it does.

I think I've cited enough sources. Would you like to provide some evidence to the contrary?

No, I don't think you've cited anything to that effect.

Let's be clear, I reviewed your PR and your posts in this thread. You posted a link like

There are pre-existing assets under the CC BY-ND that we'd be able to use (here's a set I found last night from OpenGameArt: https://samanthafoster.bandcamp.com/alb ... -bag-vol-1). There are artists who prefer working under the CC BY-ND, especially musicians. And there are artists who, quite bluntly, don't want their art frankensteined

It's one thing to say "there exist people like this". It's a completely different thing to say "allowing CC-BY-ND will revive wesnoth UMC asset contributions".

There are also lots of people who prefer to contribute only to copyleft projects like GNU Linux and aren't interested in contributing to projects that won't make a commitment not to become a corporate / for-profit endeavour in the future, and so are opposed to BSD-style licenses, let alone BY-ND. You can't claim that changing to more permissive licenses will increase the support a project has without evidence -- you might lose just as many people as you gain by the switch.

Probably more important than either of these, in the case of wesnoth, is the simple risk of creating confusion, which is what everyone else mentioned.

Look I'm not trying to kill your proposal here, I'm basically trying to compromise and work this out. I don't like that the Wesnoth project as a whole has alot of inertia and I want to see it change. And especially if shadowm and vultraz are gung ho about this proposal that alone gives it merit, at least in my mind.

But I think your rhethoric in this thread has gotten a little over the top and you've made several claims here that I don't think you can really hope to support. I find that kind of thing irritating.

There hasn't been a history of UMC content creators asking us to relax the licensing rules. This is basically the first time this has happened. If you could show that actually, lots of UMC makers want this, or that lots of people who don't currently make add-ons would do so, that would be a good way to say that it would "revive UMC asset contributions".

If a lot of people on the forum simply posted in this thread and said "thumbs up, this is great, this will be wonderful for my add-on" etc., that would be a good way to see that there is some support for this. But that hasn't really happened either.

In regards to opinions of developers, here are some quotes from the github PR from April 2016:

There are two big issues here:

UMC authors frequently copy from other UMC without bothering to acquaint themselves with licensing
mainline wesnoth occasionally mainlines UMC content

If we require all UMC contributions to be GPL-licensed, that makes all of this mostly work, by assuming that the author either used GPL-compatible content or made it himself.
If we allow other licenses, that means people need to keep track of which license applies to what, which license is compatible with what, and will cause the addon server to generally descend into licensing-hell.

You're perfectly free to also provide your content under other licenses, but to ensure that the common workflow remains legal, we must require that the content is also available under the GPLv2.

I haven't been involved in wesnoth recently, but that's the reason it wasn't changed in the past.

One of my worries with these changes is that they will require a lot of policing and administration. We'd have to be able to tell which content is licensed under what, provide a mechanism for authors to complain that their contents is mis-used (by not attributing or following the forms of the licensing).

As a whole, I think we need to discuss this further, and I suggest we develop a plan over the mailing list. I think it would be good to allow other licenses for UMC and assets, but we'd have a colossal job on our hands to either get the artwork relicensed or replaced.

I am not a lawyer, but I do not think that the PR as it stands is sufficient to accommodate the goals of @pydsigner, so I am strongly opposed to this being merged at this stage.

Has there been another large dev discussion on email or irc or something? If so I missed it, sorry. (Just went through dev-ML, didn't find any emails about this since as far back as April 2016.)

Otherwise I don't think I'm "the only person who thinks it can wait", many devs simply said they were strongly opposed for a variety of reasons. No one said they thought this was critical, the old system was broken and this change can't wait.

[Pentarctagon]

1. The worst thing that could happen from this realistically is, add-on makers get confused, get angry at eachother, and we have to sort out a bunch of messes. There are actually *a lot* of different CC licenses and which ones are compatible is not always straightforward to understand, there are large tables and such on the CC website, but licensing questions can get really horrible and nuanced, especially in regards to judgments of when something is or isn't a derivative work. When we only had one license there's a lot less room for confusion.

CC0
CC BY
CC BY-SA
CC BY-ND
CC BY-SA-NC
CC BY-ND-NC

Yeah that looks like a lot of licences, but, for Wesnoth, there is only really one major concern — SA or ND. I'm pretty sure all of our creators can understand the difference between "yes, you can modify this" and "no, you can't modify this".

NC I am also somewhat concerned about, as it seems a bit more legally in a legal grey area.

More generally though, is there any reason this move couldn't be broken up into two pieces?

Part 1) Allow CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA, for mainline and UMC for 1.14.
Part 2) Take a better/deeper look at ND and NC, and then allow one or both of them if everything seems fine by the time 1.16 comes around.

Those two seem to be the ones most likely to cause any problems, and it's much easier to add them to the "allowed licenses" list later, than adding them and then having to remove them after a couple years.

Also, on a separate note, I think it would be a good idea to specify which versions of these licenses are allowed, since Creative Commons is on version 4 now. Should only version 4 be allowed, or are versions 1-3 acceptable as well?

[pyndragon]

Again, I've already stated in this thread and elsewhere that we should add a key to the _server.pbl. We're already rewriting the add-on dialog for 1.14 anyways.

A key in _server.pbl is great, but the add-on dialog should actually use that key also, it shouldn't just get fobbed off until 1.16.

Isn't that implied in what I said?

you also spoke of it 6 months ago. Nothing happened with it then. I suggested that you email the mailing list, or make some polls on the website, and for whatever reason you declined all of those things.

In IRC it was suggested that I make a write-up for the forum. I didn't have spare time in July to do so, so I put it off until now.

Actually, the only people who spoke in favor of it so far are you, Vultraz, and shadowm [...]

There hasn't been a history of UMC content creators asking us to relax the licensing rules. This is basically the first time this has happened. If you could show that actually, lots of UMC makers want this, or that lots of people who don't currently make add-ons would do so, that would be a good way to say that it would "revive UMC asset contributions".

If a lot of people on the forum simply posted in this thread and said "thumbs up, this is great, this will be wonderful for my add-on" etc., that would be a good way to see that there is some support for this. But that hasn't really happened either.

This isn't even close to true. In this thread, I pointed out 3 mainline contributors who quit over the GPL. The first community response in this thread asserted that the change was needed. Before this was ever posted, FaeLord was inquiring in the sound forum about the possibility of using CC assets, as he had specific ones he wanted to use. shadowm wrote years ago about how the GPL was killing music contribution. vultraz wants to be able to use Vindsvept's music. I have commissions that I'm holding out of my campaign because I can't legally use them yet. szopen wrote a long-winded complaint about the GPL's "source" requirement. Shall I go on?

In regards to opinions of developers, here are some quotes from the github PR from April 2016:

There are two big issues here:

UMC authors frequently copy from other UMC without bothering to acquaint themselves with licensing
mainline wesnoth occasionally mainlines UMC content

If we require all UMC contributions to be GPL-licensed, that makes all of this mostly work, by assuming that the author either used GPL-compatible content or made it himself.
If we allow other licenses, that means people need to keep track of which license applies to what, which license is compatible with what, and will cause the addon server to generally descend into licensing-hell.

You're perfectly free to also provide your content under other licenses, but to ensure that the common workflow remains legal, we must require that the content is also available under the GPLv2.

I haven't been involved in wesnoth recently, but that's the reason it wasn't changed in the past.

He literally says that he's just explaining why it hadn't changed. He's not involved in Wesnoth any more.

One of my worries with these changes is that they will require a lot of policing and administration. We'd have to be able to tell which content is licensed under what, provide a mechanism for authors to complain that their contents is mis-used (by not attributing or following the forms of the licensing).

As a whole, I think we need to discuss this further, and I suggest we develop a plan over the mailing list. I think it would be good to allow other licenses for UMC and assets, but we'd have a colossal job on our hands to either get the artwork relicensed or replaced.

I am not a lawyer, but I do not think that the PR as it stands is sufficient to accommodate the goals of @pydsigner, so I am strongly opposed to this being merged at this stage.

He's right, the PR wasn't enough. Which is why the OP was written, it's why there'll be a wiki post, etc.

I don't see those posts as being opposed to the actual spirit of the PR.

[iceiceice]

This isn't even close to true. In this thread, I pointed out 3 mainline contributors who quit over the GPL. The first community response in this thread asserted that the change was needed. Before this was ever posted, FaeLord was inquiring in the sound forum about the possibility of using CC assets, as he had specific ones he wanted to use. shadowm wrote years ago about how the GPL was killing music contribution. vultraz wants to be able to use Vindsvept's music. I have commissions that I'm holding out of my campaign because I can't legally use them yet. szopen wrote a long-winded complaint about the GPL's "source" requirement. Shall I go on?

Okay, you're right, I missed some of your links. But some of these I think don't support your case in the way that you seem to think.

1. Musicians did complain quite a bit about the GPL, including Aleksi and TimothyP: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22098

Particularly, TimothyP writes that he registers all his tracks with Sacem which protects them. It's important to him that his tracks are not "free for anyone to mess with". So I assume your take is that he would be okay if he could release tracks under CC-BY-ND. However, is that actually clear? If Sacem effectively holds the copyright it's not clear he has the rights to do that either. I don't actually know what restrictions Sacem imposes on use of music -- it's quite possible that Sacem is not compatible with any CC license either. Do you know?

And West has written repeatedly on this forum about how "music != code" and the "project files" of the music are not related to the .ogg files in the same way that the .cpp files of wesnoth are to its executable. Basically he argues that even if you have the project files, you can't hope to reproduce the .oggs. You need to have the same symphonic sound files and the same software and the same configuration, much of which is not captured in the project files, he just says its too fiddly for a nonexpert to hope to reproduce ogg files at the same quality level that he produces them.

However, what we basically did was accommodate this point of view. The law is actually unclear as to what the "source" of music is, and to my knowledge no court has ever ruled on it. And in the wesnoth project, we generally take the point of view that the "source" of music or art content is the final shipped result -- that the project file is not, in fact, significantly "easier to modify" than the final ogg -- it's just as fiddly and error prone. Admittedly I don't know how you defend this point of view in regards to photoshop or gimp project files. But nevertheless that's been the position of the project since 2007, and we have always turned away people who try to ask for the project files of music or images.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=40087#p567453

When West left, it wasn't "I'm leaving because you guys are GPL", and it wasn't like, he demanded that we switch away from GPL and said he would come back if we were CC-BY-SA or something. Actually it sounds like he was frustrated at a number of other things.

***

Edit: Actually I did find some info about SACEM and CC:

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/SACEM-FAQ

It appears that they ran a pilot program to allow certain CC-BY-NC licenses.

• How long will the pilot last?
  
  The pilot will run for a period of 18 months starting on the 1st of January 2012 and ending on the 30th of June 2013.
• What happens to the CC-licensed works after the end of the pilot?
  
  At the end of the pilot period, SACEM members must cease to opt for Creative Commons Non-Commercial (NC) licenses for additional works, in the absence of an extension of the pilot (which is not guaranteed to occur). However works that have been placed under a Creative Commons license during the pilot can continue to be used in accordance with the terms of the license and of the pilot, after the end of the pilot. We are hoping that the pilot will lead to a more structured solution that allows SACEM members to make use of Creative Commons license after the pilot has ended.

It appears that they renewed the agreement at least once, I had trouble finding current info: https://translate.google.com/translate? ... rev=search

My take is that, it's clear that we were going to lose those guys in 2008 no matter what unless we could get them to stop using SACEM. Even if mainline became CC-BY-SA, that's still not compatible with SACEM.

It's possible that going forwards we could get SACEM contributors, for UMC, if we allow these NC licenses they mentioned, and if this pilot became the permanent policy of SACEM.

2. "The first community response in this thread asserted that the change was needed."

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to here. I think there *is* a consensus that GPL is not ideal for art and that we should fix this. But so far as I know there has never been a consensus to move away from copyleft, and indeed I would be shocked if there was a consensus around something like that that formed without me noticing.

3. "FaeLord was inquiring in the sound forum about the possibility of using CC assets"

Yeah, that's a great point in your favor.

4. "shadowm wrote years ago about how the GPL was killing music contribution."

Okay, but that's just a post on his blog. It's not a post on the forums, it didn't go on the ML, it wasn't a proposal for a specific change. To my knowledge it wasn't discussed by the developers at large. This is the first time I ever saw that.

Also I don't think he's really saying "GPL is killing music contribution", he's making a more nuanced point. But we already know he supports your proposal today anyways.

5. "vultraz wants to be able to use Vindsvept's music."

Okay, I didn't find a link. Again, first I heard of this. I did know that Vultraz was supporting this change. Again, it's not a post on the forums, it didn't go on the ML, it wasn't a proposal for a specific change.

6. "I have commissions that I'm holding out of my campaign because I can't legally use them yet."

I don't find this surprising. :p

7. "szopen wrote a long-winded complaint about the GPL's "source" requirement."

I remember you mentioned this on IRC. Again, this is like the blog post from years ago. He feels strongly enough about it to write a complaint and post it in a text file in his add-on, but not enough to make a forum post, send an email, actually solicit opinions of people and try to get a change. Why?

8. "He [AI0867]'s not involved in Wesnoth any more."

Well, he was certainly a lot more involved and around for a lot longer than TimothyP and Aleksi. I think he is still one of the four "administrators" of the wesnoth github repository? It looks like they recently fiddled with it and made the administrator team not visible, or possibly reorganized it...

Edit: I think github just changed their look and feel a bit, you can see who are the owners of the wesnoth organization here: https://github.com/orgs/wesnoth/people

[vultraz]

Yes, I want to use Vindsvept's music in my addon.

West left because people kept demanding he release the "sources" of his works. When he took effort to release something along those lines, there was no response. To be fair, most of the people complaining had left by that point, but it still hit him the wrong way. The cases that led to the departure of other music contributors can still be linked to the GPL. The fact is that we're only switching away from it now, and whether CC SA or CC ND is what SACEM requires, neither is the GPL!

This discussion is getting frankly ridiculous. This is objectively a good change, and saying it should be broken up or delayed because a million people haven't flocked demanding it is ridiculous! Again, I point to Skyrim modding. More modder resources are always welcome! There's no way allowing more resources be used in Wesnoth UMC will in any way not allow the creation or more unique content! The status quo is a restrictive environment where everyone draws from the same limited pool! I see it in no way a bad thing to increase that pool at the cost of the use of certain resources being slightly restricted!

Continuing to argue semantics and specifics of every word everyone has every said regarding this issue is pointless and not advancing this discussion any further. Can we please stop arguing and instead focus on getting this change implemented in the most expedient and efficient manner?

As for the GitHub thing, yes, the Admins group was removed in favor of certain members just being marked as owners of the repo.

[doofus-01]

Continuing to argue semantics and specifics of every word everyone has every said regarding this issue is pointless and not advancing this discussion any further. Can we please stop arguing and instead focus on getting this change implemented in the most expedient and efficient manner?

I want to chime in for one thing that has already been brought up but that I hope doesn't get lost in this. The current "anything goes" with image appropriating (music is another story) is surely not because UMC authors are making judicious and thoughtful decisions based upon a close reading of GPL. It is because they see some images getting recycled in multiple add-ons, and monkey see, monkey do. Most of us don't come here to play lawyer. Sorry if I missed this, but wouldn't having -ND just provide endless "enforcement opportunities" for the developers and moderators? Unless Wesnoth can just say, "We'll allow CC-BY-ND, but it's not our problem if someone makes a derivative work." (?)

Getting rid of the "source" requirement for art and music would be welcome. I've never seen it used in a productive way, just as a means of mild harassment.