The Mana World Forums

Tmw is a open source project currently using the (GPL) General public license. In the past other license have been used with it and it wasn't an issue. Today we are faced with the confusion about image license needing to be compatible with the project license. While moral says this is fact it really is not. With proper documentation we can easily allow new art and current art to be used under multiple licenses. It would be false to say it can /only/ be done with dual license. There is an issue with unknown authors we face. It is that we cannot credit them for the work they did but we do have documentation that the work they did is GPL http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1177 . If this isn't true and we can't find out where the art originally came from we really have no business using it under any license. Its not much of a proposal as I already see the facts. I'm just putting all of them into one forum topic. TMW is no doubt a GPL project. We do License art and other things under different license. We do have an agreement of GPL for art posted on the forum or other communication services owned by the project. The terms state very clearly unless specified by the author different terms. (ie: cc-sa-by)

I propose we leave things that aren't broken alone and properly document authors if it is requested. Otherwise we agree all art contributed is GPL unless specified otherwise.

Arguing over a license is silly especially if you don't understand it.

meway wrote:In the past other license have been used with it and it wasn't an issue.

TMW cannot use anything that is not GPL. Managing a patchwork of licenses is a massive headache. People are obviously free to make their work available under other licenses as well, but in order for it to be used with TMW, it must be available under GPL.

meway wrote:With proper documentation we can easily allow new art and current art to be used under multiple licenses. It would be false to say it can /only/ be done with dual license.

Maintaining a patchwork of licenses is hell. For the sake of sanity for everyone on this project, everything must be dual licenced until all the old authors have agreed to use the new license, and then everyone can cleanly switch over to a license far better suited for content than GPL.

meway wrote:I propose we leave things that aren't broken alone and properly document authors if it is requested. Otherwise we agree all art contributed is GPL unless specified otherwise.

All art contributed is available under GPL. If it isn't available under GPL (it can be made available under licenses as well as GPL, obviously), then it hasn't been contributed.

There is currently an initiative to license all existing works under CC-BY-SA in addition to the GPL, which, by nature of it being used, it must have already been licensed under. This will eventually give TMW the option of removing the GPL requirement in favour of CC-BY-SA.


---Freeyorp

Or we could remove the requirement of SA

TMWs philosophy is and always was Copyleft. The reason for this is that we don't want people to steal our work, modify it and use it for proprietary games. CC-BY without the SA would allow that.