Planeshift

[martenzo]

I found this nice OS MMORPG, one of the best OSource MMORPGs I've ever seen, in fact, one of the few I've ever seen, I hope there are going to more of their kind.

http://www.planeshift.it/

[Dragon Master]

The game looks promising. A word to everyone, it requires bittorrent and a loooong time to upload.

[turin]

They're not, IMHO, really free.

[Elvish_Pillager]

Not 'really' free? The game isn't free at all!

"We support Open Source & we think users should be able to modify & distribute modified versions of the game but we do not want any modified versions of the game to exist, so we are reserving rights on crucial game components to prevent this from happening."

[turin]

Not 'really' free? The game isn't free at all!

That's what I said, isn't it?

I suppose the emphases could have been misinterpreted. What I meant was, "They're not, IMHO, actually free, they just claim to be free."

[Elvish_Pillager]

Whoops, yeah.

[Jetrel]

The code is totally free, it's the art that isn't.

I don't really understand their motive for doing that.
My best guess is that .. as usual .. the artists have their head clear up their you-know-what, and are afraid to give stuff away for free.




What I *could* understand would be some company doing such a thing, and then selling the game; the idea being that - with an engine that's nothing extraordinary, and with content that took the vast majority of the time to develop, the content is the "unique" selling point. And besides sound effects, and some texture-type art, most game content is *not* reuseable in other games - so it's not really a loss to the open community.

The code is the most important thing to have free - it means that if we wanted to make a game like that, we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

[Dragon Master]

"We support Open Source & we think users should be able to modify & distribute modified versions of the game but we do not want any modified versions of the game to exist, so we are reserving rights on crucial game components to prevent this from happening."

what a great quote. I tried the game out...wasn't impressed. They have races that aren't complete artwise, so instead of just not letting you play as them, they use existing models form other races, which is endlessly confusing. One race has a male and female forms that are exactly the same, while another has only male forms. Yet then it asks your mother and fathers name.... After I set up my character (I must say, it was clever how they determined your stats by how you choose life events), the game lagged and lagged. It actually felt like Neverwinter Nights.

[irrevenant]

The code is totally free, it's the art that isn't.
I don't really understand their motive for doing that.
My best guess is that .. as usual .. the artists have their head clear up their you-know-what, and are afraid to give stuff away for free.

AFAIK, the rationale was that they wanted Planeshift to retain its distinctiveness. Much like you said they consider the content to be their unique selling point.

[...] besides sound effects, and some texture-type art, most game content is *not* reuseable in other games - so it's not really a loss to the open community.

I'm not convinced that's true. If Planeshift's art was Free, I suspect you'd be seeing it in everything from FPSes like Nexuiz and Sauerbraten to other MMORPG projects to RTSes.

Unlike Planeshift, I'm not convinced that's a bad thing...

[appleide]

Holy Crap! They are trying to create an OSS monopoly! As soon as you submit anything, you can't use it yourself any more! They are sucking up all OSS into a single project!

They are the Micro$oft of the OSS world!!

Explanation of Atomic Blue Contribution License Agreement

A contributor do not have to be a member of Atomic Blue (a non-profit organization), to submit graphics, rules, code or any other contribution for use in PlaneShift. However, he is required to agree to the ABC LICENSE, which creates three categories into which submissions are divided, each of which is licensed differently: source code, game rules and all other work.

Source code, other than game rules, are treated as open source software covered by the GNU General Public License, available here http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html with copyright explicitly assigned to Atomic Blue.
Game rules can be scripts, documents, or any other expression in any media. In any of these forms, Game rules are not open source they are the property of Atomic Blue. You should not submit any game rules unless you agree that they belong to Atomic Blue and that you will not have the right to use them in any other application.
Any other work (such as 2D graphics, 3D models, music and sounds, character descriptions or fantasy world histories) will be the property of Atomic Blue once you submit it, but you will continue to have the right to display the work as part of a personal portfolio. You are not allowed to display or use the work in another game or application and you are not allowed to use derivative works owned by Atomic Blue.

If all of Planeshift is copyrighted by Atomic Blue except the code which is in the public domain, couldn't Atomic Blue just stop releasing the game for free one day and sell it? Without ever giving back credits to the contributors who are not members? Taking away their right to use it in their own applications?

[Njorhg]

Of course they could, when you give something to Atomic Blue it becomes theirs.
They can cease to offer it one day and start to request payment for it on another.

Now remember that the Game Rules they cite, is often not covered by common copyright laws.
Ergo, any claims otherwise would fall.
The method of expression however might fall under copyright protection depending on originality and so on.

The part about Art is that all work of Art submitted to them becomes theirs but with some leway for the contributor.

That the Source Code is Open Source Code Software means simply that, you'll be allowed to modify/utilize submitted code as you want. The explicitly assigned Copyright mostly matters for Distribution.

[Fafnir]

A major glitch that push to the use of bots or acting like one, and in reaction a hunt often brutal and blind, is the way to gain pp by slaining again and again the same creature reappearing.

[martenzo]

Heh, I just found out the engie is not entirely made by the Planeshift crew, the base for the engie, crystal space, is GPL, so they have to give out the code for free, but the art...well, ditto on Jetryl about that. So no, appleide, they can't start selling the game, without pissiong off the entire OS community.

[zookeeper]

Now just stop that mindless "they're not really free" thingy for starters. Wesnoth isn't really free either, since it has license restrictions. Nothing that has restrictions isn't completely free. It's as simple as that.

I have to admit that I understand restricting the use of art much more than I understand restricting the use of code and such, although I don't think there's necessarily much benefit in the end in doing so, especially when apparently in this case the individual contributors don't even own any rights to their own contributions, which sounds really daft. But then again, the contributors know what they're signing up for (if they don't, they're dumb), so it's one's own fault if now having rights to one's own contributions becomes a problem later on (if one has contributed a lot of content and only later decides he wants to use them for something else, too). Of course that doesn't make the licensing method nice or anything, it's still pretty annoying. Besides, at least in some parts of the world, such waiving of one's own authorship over a work might be invalid anyway, at least if it's not done in some rather specific way.

Anyway, doesn't look very interesting at all to me.

[Kiba]

Zookeeper: Wesnoth is Free softwares in my opinion. But I guess it depend on the definitions of "Free".


Planetshift used non-free art == bad. So I am not downloading it, period. No matter how good it is. In my point of view, the source code is Free, the art is not.