Bug#461659: warsow: New version of warsow possibly non-distributable.

[Joe Smith]

"Andres Mejia" <mcitadel at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:730e8cfc0801221012w3ed79b5dmc1a412702a3dac5 at mail.gmail.com...
> Hello,
>
> I'm sorry, I forgot to ask about other concerns that myself and
> another member of the Debian Games team had.


You should have been more clear that you were concerned not about freeness, 
but about the ability to distribute the data in non-free.



>
> I'll repeat what Vincent (the other member) was concerned about.
>
> "On Jan 21, 2008 10:26 PM, Andres Mejia <mcitadel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    3. You may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, sell, participate
>> in the transfer or sale or reproduce, create Derivative Works from,
>> distribute, perform, display or in any way exploit any of the Material
>> released under this License unless expressly permitted by the Warsow
>> Team.
>>
>>    4. You may freely distribute the Warsow archive/installer
>> unmodified on any media. You may re-compress using different archival
>> formats suitable for your OS (i.e. zip/tgz/rpm/deb/dmg), any changes
>> beyond that require explicit permission of the Chasseur de bots
>> association.
>
>  This two points are contradictory: 3 says no one can distribute, 4
> says it's fine to distribute if you don't touch anything. Moreover,
> there are two different groups mentioned in here: the 'Chasseurs de
> bots association' and the 'Warsow Team'. We'd better take this to
> debian-legal. To me, it looks like a very badly-written license with
> ambiguous clauses."

I agree that it is a very poor licence. It is obviously not free.
As stated it is definately questionable.
They probably do intend for Debian to be able to continue packaging the data 
in non-free,
hence the mention of the deb format, but in this case clarification is 
definately desireable.

> That was his concern. My concern was that this license stated "Assets
> that are property of Chasseur de bots, use the following Warsow
> Content License." However, the last part of clause 3 mentions that
> exceptions can be made by the "Warsow Team." Would this be a problem
> if we are to distribute warsow in Debian?

It is certainly odd, but I suspect that "Warsow Team" is the same thing as 
the "Chasseur de bots team (the development team for Warsow)"
which I suspect is the primary (only?) subdivion of the "Chasseur de bots 
association". They are definately being quite loose with their terminology.

I would seek clarifiaction from the Association itself as to whether we may 
contine to distribute the data files in non-free as we have done in the 
past, with further clarification that the message is also the position of 
the Warsow Team.

Based on the terms, clarifcation from both the Association itself and the 
team that we may continue to package the files as we have should be 
sufficent to allow the distribution of the packaged form of the new data 
files.


> Below is the previous question I asked earlier.
>
> There's an issue with the new upstream version of warsow that I think
> will make it undistributable, even in the non-free category of Debian.
> I've attached the entire license file for the new version of warsow.
>
> I want to know if it will still be possible to distribute the old
> version of warsow. The old license states,
>
> "Warsow license information:
>
> The game engine is based on the QFusion engine and licensed under the GNU
> General Public license. A copy of the GPL license should come with this
> package, in file named gnu.txt, if not look at
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
>
> Game data files are copyrighted by their respective authors. You may only
> redistribute the game data in unmodified form unless you have written
> permission from the copyright owner."

Until clarification can be obtained, I would remain with the old version, as
that definately gves us permissions we need, and nothing has indicated that
they revoked this permission, only that the new versions come under a 
different set of terms.

> Please CC myself and 461659 at bugs.debian.org when replying to this email.
>
Done.


Disclamer: IANAL, IANADD
> -- 
> Regards,
> Andres Mejia