legal question
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legal question
is it legal to use graphics of wesnoth for my browsergame?
do i have to license the game under GPL than?
do i have to license the game under GPL than?
wesnoth is distributed under the GNU general public license, it's free/open source, but i think using it's graphics to make another game, you need to license it under GPL so you don't get into any copyrights issues with the makers of wesnoth. of course unless they've given you permission to use the wesnoth graphics.
Last edited by playtom on September 4th, 2007, 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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I think as long as you keep the images that you borrow from Wesnoth under a GPL license, and make sure that you keep an explicit list of which images are GPL-ed, then it doesn't matter what your other media and code is licensed under. There's a lot of non-GPL code out there that uses GPL or LGPL code libraries to do their work. I'm not an expert on this though, so don't quote me.
Also I think you need to keep those GPL-ed images open publicly (ie, don't drop them in with a bunch of other media into a proprietary file format that contains all this data). Well, you could still do that, but you would have to honor any requests that you get to provide the GPL-ed content in an "acceptable medium" (.png, .jpg, etc). We use some Wesnoth artwork in our game, but our game code and media are both GPL licensed, so we don't really have to worry about this.
Also I think you need to keep those GPL-ed images open publicly (ie, don't drop them in with a bunch of other media into a proprietary file format that contains all this data). Well, you could still do that, but you would have to honor any requests that you get to provide the GPL-ed content in an "acceptable medium" (.png, .jpg, etc). We use some Wesnoth artwork in our game, but our game code and media are both GPL licensed, so we don't really have to worry about this.
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Re: legal question
Guys, don't you think he just has to license the artwork under the GPL, not the whole game?Lorbi wrote:is it legal to use graphics of wesnoth for my browsergame?
do i have to license the game under GPL than?
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PingPangQui
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Re: legal question
As Roots stated correctly: As long as he strictly separates it from non-GPL-licensed stuff this is correct.Shadow Master wrote:Guys, don't you think he just has to license the artwork under the GPL, not the whole game?Lorbi wrote:is it legal to use graphics of wesnoth for my browsergame?
do i have to license the game under GPL than?
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"Larry the Cow was a bit frustrated at the current state of Linux distributions (...) until he tried Gentoo Linux" - Free Software for free people.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Ask better informed people if you need a definite answer.
The GPL need only be applied to derivate works that are published.
I think these requirements could be met, since you are distributing the graphics as part of the other content generated by the game to the users. Therefore you would be obligated to license whatever the game generates under GPL.
However, if you do not publish the code running on the server, I think you are not required to put the code under GPL, too.
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"Strict separation":
Yes, that is the requirement. But what does that mean in the context of a browser game? If the graphics are used in a web page, are they "strictly separate" from the text of the page?
The GPL need only be applied to derivate works that are published.
I think these requirements could be met, since you are distributing the graphics as part of the other content generated by the game to the users. Therefore you would be obligated to license whatever the game generates under GPL.
However, if you do not publish the code running on the server, I think you are not required to put the code under GPL, too.
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"Strict separation":
Yes, that is the requirement. But what does that mean in the context of a browser game? If the graphics are used in a web page, are they "strictly separate" from the text of the page?
I very much doubt "keeping a list" is sufficient for "strict separation".I think as long as you keep the images that you borrow from Wesnoth under a GPL license, and make sure that you keep an explicit list of which images are GPL-ed, then it doesn't matter what your other media and code is licensed under.