Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

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iceiceice
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by iceiceice »

It should be perhaps mentioned also that "Battle for Wesnoth" has recently been registered legally as a trademark of Wesnoth Inc.

Code: Select all

20160808 22:37:03< shadowm> Also, regarding transparency: Wesnoth Inc recently filed a registration claim for the "Wesnoth" trademark. I have no idea if that's finished or whatever. But you can clearly see that this hasn't been mentioned anywhere at all and the implications are wholly unknown even to me.
20160808 22:37:30< vultraz> I confirmed with Dave that it indeed went through.
http://trademark.markify.com/trademarks ... h/87040364
http://www.texasregistry.org/wesnoth-inc
https://www.statelog.com/wesnoth-inc-bellevue-wa

I didn't find a more complete business registration form related to Wesnoth inc. online.

You might also want to read what they write about Wesnoth here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogatto_%26_Friends
Appears that Jetrel, shadowm, marcavis, and others have edited it at various points.
Wikipedia Frogatto and Friends wrote:In contrast to their previous project, The Battle for Wesnoth, the Frogatto team did development as a small centralized team, with the intention of building a solid engine and a game to showcase that engine, before trying to build a community around the game. Due to the licensing situation, the original authors faced protests from the community when they attempted to commercialize The Battle for Wesnoth, given that the community contributions were significant and these contributors would not get a share from the revenues. Trying to avoid such problems in their new project, they initially started working with a small group, adapted a dual license for the engine code while keeping the game content non-open.[7]
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Tad_Carlucci »

iceiceice wrote:It should be perhaps mentioned also that "Battle for Wesnoth" has recently been registered legally as a trademark of Wesnoth Inc.
Not legally registered .. applied for ..

Filing Date:
May 17, 2016

Current Status:
NEW APPLICATION - RECORD INITIALIZED NOT ASSIGNED TO EXAMINER
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Aldarisvet
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Aldarisvet »

iceiceice wrote: Due to the licensing situation, the original authors faced protests from the community when they attempted to commercialize The Battle for Wesnoth, given that the community contributions were significant and these contributors would not get a share from the revenues.
Thats really good that Wesnoth is not commercialized. Would it be, I would be some average one commercial game or even worse because the competition in the sphere of professional-made games is quite high. Wesnoth is unique because we are trying to build a communism here. Of course it's barely works but still works so that is the object of the interest. This game better to be developed on unpaid contributions of time of volunteers. So better there would be no donations. I can understand why core team wanted to commercialize Wesnoth, they wanted to try themselves as professional game-creators. But there is no guarantee that if you succeed in creating such free game/open project as Wesnoth you will succeed as professional game designer for the commercial game.

I personally would even not put Wesnoth in top-10 games I like myself. Just recently I started playing Arcanum after 12-year pause (the game of 2001 year) and I really get a pleasure every minute I play. For strategy I would prefer Civilization IV. And Wesnoth for me is like "not-very-much-loved" child that you still care about because it is your duty :lol:
Last edited by Aldarisvet on August 15th, 2016, 5:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by iceiceice »

Aldarisvet: It was commercialized in the sense that, it was sold on iphone for years and was a top 100 game there for years.
Aldarisvet wrote: Wesnoth is unique because we are trying to build a communism here. Of course it's barely works but still works so that is the object of the interest.
+1

I agree that the most interesting part of Wesnoth is the communistic nature, and the part where it is all free and for share. But it's worth to understand that many of the former developers aren't happy about this and are essentially trying to reform / relaunch the project. They aren't wrong to want this, they can organize as they like. But not everyone is going to go along obviously.

I think that it's likely that both projects will continue to be developed. But they somehow need to be disentangled, or some agreement needs to be reached.
Aldarisvet wrote: I personally would even not put Wesnoth in top-10 games I like myself.
I actually personally, really really like the game play. I think it is especially interesting in 1 v 1, you can play it for years and still have much more to learn, and get crushed by the more experienced players. It's one of the only human vs human strategy games that I really enjoy playing nowadays. It's definitely in my personal top 10 for gameplay.
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by doofus-01 »

iceiceice wrote:I agree that the most interesting part of Wesnoth is the communistic nature, and the part where it is all free and for share. But it's worth to understand that many of the former developers aren't happy about this and are essentially trying to reform / relaunch the project. They aren't wrong to want this, they can organize as they like. But not everyone is going to go along obviously.
Can they do a claw-back of the original Wesnoth concepts and assets, as part of the relaunch, through a changing of the license? Or could future contributions to Wesnoth be in danger? (I'm trying to understand what the "Wesnoth, Inc." filing implies.)
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Celtic_Minstrel »

The license of the Wesnoth code can't really be changed easily, due to the sheer number of contributers - everyone who has ever contributed would need to be contacted, probably even if their code is no longer present (because it would be quite difficult to prove that it's not). For images, I think they'd only need to contact the artist to get permission to use them under a different license.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think future contributions could be in danger unless their actions convince all the devs to abandon the open-source project (which is quite unlikely).
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Pentarctagon »

It seems like kind of a strange time to try and make a "Wesnoth 2", what with the current Wesnoth to be released on Steam (relatively) soon. I have a hard time thinking of a better way to confuse people.
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Eagle_11 »

An game gets an sequel for reasons, such as having reached the limits of it's current capability and requiring new capacity, which often materialized in the form of an engine upgrade, or an content expansion addon to the base game, as otherwise getting new stuff into the game to keep player's interest would not be possible.

So i have to ask, assuming the capabilities in wesnoth 1 has not reached it's peak yet, what has moved the developers to attempt the same idea again but in another engine ? (did i understood this correctly?)
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Andrettin »

iceiceice wrote:You might also want to read what they write about Wesnoth here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogatto_%26_Friends
Appears that Jetrel, shadowm, marcavis, and others have edited it at various points.
Wikipedia Frogatto and Friends wrote:In contrast to their previous project, The Battle for Wesnoth, the Frogatto team did development as a small centralized team, with the intention of building a solid engine and a game to showcase that engine, before trying to build a community around the game. Due to the licensing situation, the original authors faced protests from the community when they attempted to commercialize The Battle for Wesnoth, given that the community contributions were significant and these contributors would not get a share from the revenues. Trying to avoid such problems in their new project, they initially started working with a small group, adapted a dual license for the engine code while keeping the game content non-open.[7]
I've read that on Wikipedia before, but found no mention of it anywhere in the forums; would be nice to be able to read a bit of that history.
iceiceice wrote: I agree that the most interesting part of Wesnoth is the communistic nature, and the part where it is all free and for share. But it's worth to understand that many of the former developers aren't happy about this and are essentially trying to reform / relaunch the project. They aren't wrong to want this, they can organize as they like. But not everyone is going to go along obviously.

I think that it's likely that both projects will continue to be developed. But they somehow need to be disentangled, or some agreement needs to be reached.
Which project do you mean? Not Argentum Age, perchance?
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Aldarisvet »

Pentarctagon wrote:It seems like kind of a strange time to try and make a "Wesnoth 2", what with the current Wesnoth to be released on Steam (relatively) soon. I have a hard time thinking of a better way to confuse people.
Nope, that all that happens is quite logical. There are three things:
1. Wesnoth-1 in Steam.
2. Registering a trademark.
3. Producing Wesnoth-2.

Step 1 provides great advertisement for the name Wesnoth, squeezing the last juices from Wesnoth-1. Then step 2 let you monopolize that PR effect. Then step 3 let you monetize all prior steps of life of Wesnoth, since wide masses would be loyal for Wesnoth brand and would be eager to play the sequel and pay for it, even despite some small group of individuals from this forum (so called community) will be upset. Well, it is a plan for a couple of years I think, not all is so fast.
Andrettin wrote:
iceiceice wrote: I think that it's likely that both projects will continue to be developed. But they somehow need to be disentangled, or some agreement needs to be reached.
Which project do you mean? Not Argentum Age, perchance?
I think Iceiceice means that wesnoth-1 and wesnoth-2 would exist in parallel (but nothing can prevent devs from shutting down Wesnoth-1 at every moment because they control all servers, still this wouldnt be a sane step at the current moment of course). I really laughed when I read "wesnoth2 - A spiritual successor to the open source game Battle for Wesnoth" - everything is said just in several words. That reminds me "The King is dead. Long live the King!"
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by ForestDragon »

@Aldarisvet: as you said yourself about the disadvantages of going into commercial game category, that there is too much competition there, and that wesnoth may be outshined by plenty of existing commercial games out there, while amongst open-source games, it is one of the best in my opinion. also another huge disadvantage of doing so is this:

you said about the 'minority' that are 'communsitic', well, that minority is the UMC creators, basically the aristocrates (fancy word i put in there) of the wesnoth community (they are much more respected than gamers) and dismissing their interests would mean dismissing most of the UMC as whole (and without UMC wesnoth isn't much actually)

EDIT: Whoops, i think i double-posted, can someone remove the previous comment please?
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by iceiceice »

Aldarisvet wrote: I think Iceiceice means that wesnoth-1 and wesnoth-2 would exist in parallel (but nothing can prevent devs from shutting down Wesnoth-1 at every moment because they control all servers, still this wouldnt be a sane step at the current moment of course)
Yeah I meant that I think "wesnoth-2" will not be the death of "wesnoth-1" probably. Most of the "community" developers were not invited to join "wesnoth-2" and don't know anything about "Wesnoth inc.", I think it's accurate to say. But I doubt they will just drop the hobby entirely, many of them invested years and enjoyed doing it. There have been many discussions in month of august about this, and many entreaties to all look at Anura and get interested over past year. So maybe some folks will still have some interest in that, can't say for sure, but I think some sizeable fraction of the remaining developers are interested in Wesnoth 1, GPL code-base and open art-assets only. (Don't know, can't really poll them all.)

If all the developers leave then wesnoth-1 will be dead. Also if art development languishes, that seems like a very bad sign. But also, some of the devs that remain are pretty determined, they came after the "call for help" when it was already in trouble anyways, and expected some difficulties. (Maybe not these difficulties exactly :) )
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Pentarctagon »

What is the anura code base licensed as? The LICENSE on anura says it's "available for license under the following open source license", but then there's just a few bullet points rather than any specific license.
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by gnombat »

Pentarctagon wrote:What is the anura code base licensed as? The LICENSE on anura says it's "available for license under the following open source license", but then there's just a few bullet points rather than any specific license.
It looks like the zlib/libpng license.
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Re: Donating to Battle for Wesnoth

Post by Celtic_Minstrel »

Aldarisvet wrote:(but nothing can prevent devs from shutting down Wesnoth-1 at every moment because they control all servers, still this wouldnt be a sane step at the current moment of course).
This is not really true. There is no particular monopoly on Wesnoth servers — sure, most people use the official server simply because it's the default, but there is absolutely nothing to prevent anyone from putting up a new server of their own; and in the unlikely event of Wesnoth shutting down its servers, I would fully expect people to do exactly that.
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