Re: Battle for Wesnoth relicensing

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

(note: I haven't read ESR's piece)

Pete Chown <1@234.cx> writes:
> - People who have contributed code to Wesnoth are going to get upset; 
> they thought they were contributing to an open source project, not a 
> "look but don't touch" freeware project.  This could cause the game to 
> fork.

If we speculate about people's feelings, the list'd be endless :-)

> - At least Debian and probably other Linux distributions will throw the 
> game out.  I see this as a problem, though if you follow the link above, 
> you will see that many people who work on Wesnoth don't.

They might.  Debian is overly strict at times.

> - ESR is suggesting using the NoDerivs option from Creative Commons.  
> Since Wesnoth as a whole is a derived work of its media files, I could 
> imagine this making it illegal to distribute the game at all.  The same 
> problem would occur from the other end; the code would be under GPL and 
> the GPL says that its terms have to be applied to the entire derived work.

I don't think the gave is a deriv of the media files.  The game was not
written based on those particular music files - it was written to play any
music file (I assume).

> - If you want to say that Wesnoth is free ("speech") then surely people 
> should be able to change the music and the art, not just the code.

Whether or not people should be free to modify music and art is up for
debate, even among the staunchest free software supports.

People should be free to modify software because when they can't, they risk
privacy problems, compatibility problems, lack of control of their daily
lives, lack of control over their data, etc.  These issues aren't the same
for music and art.  Being able to modify everything is nice, but there's no
consensus that it's an absolute ethical imperative or that it's necessary
for a functioning democracy.


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan, +32 477 36 44 19, http://ciaran.compsoc.com/

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