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Which open source license does zero k use?

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DErankDavid1995
8 years ago
http://opensource.org/licenses
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DErankDavid1995
8 years ago
Can I call my program "Open Source" even if I don't use an approved license?
Please don't do that. If you call it "Open Source" without using an approved license, you will confuse people. This is not merely a theoretical concern — we have seen this confusion happen in the past, and it's part of the reason we have a formal license approval process. See also our page on license proliferation for why this is a problem.
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PLrankAdminSprung
8 years ago
Various; GPL unless specified otherwise. The other ones are usually CC or PD.
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DErankDavid1995
8 years ago
thanks I will modify it in accordance with the GPL licence.
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JPrankgajop
8 years ago
Game (lua) code must be GPL compliant because it's using SpringRTS so that's not important.
Not sure what's the licence on the server/infra code or lobby, but probably similar.
Art is confusing... no idea what each file is licensed as, and afaik it's not written anywhere
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PLrankOrfelius
8 years ago
(edited 8 years ago)
Afaik most of the art has no defined license (like models for example). Altrough it was all made in a spirit of the open source if it was made inside Spring community.

All of the music was made by Danny Shendmeisser and is CC-BY-NC-ND which sucks btw because music cannot be adjusted for the trailer and using it in YT videos with voice overlay (like in casts) is questionable editing of the sound file thus interfering with the "ND" part of the license.

Most of the ZK sounds come from the open source sites or projects like UFO:AI for example. Some of the sources of sound files are of unknown origin like hiss.wav .
Every sound folder contains its origin file.
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DErankDavid1995
8 years ago
thanks looking forward to getting into this project.
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JPrankgajop
8 years ago
quote:

Afaik most of the art has no defined license (like models for example). Altrough it was all made in a spirit of the open source if it was made inside Spring community.

"Spirit of open source" means different things for different people.
As you've mentioned ND can be problematic for YT, but NC and SA can also be an issue to anyone that may want to use ZK resources for their own project.
However any (non-custom) licence is fine and is up to the contributor to choose, but what sucks is when the licence is unknown, as it basically prevents any ethical use - some people will still just ignore the licence though...
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
8 years ago
I think it was assumed anyone who made models or 2D art for ZK knew the sort of license that we expected. Basically all the models were made for ZK or at least for general use by Spring games.

I sourced a lot of the sounds and kept track of their licenses.

Someone in Spring has had communication with Denny and got some sort of license for using his music but I am not sure who. It could be Saktoth or at least Saktoth would know.
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
8 years ago
Code licensing is fine. Most of it is "GNU GPL, v2 or later" due to rampant copypasta of the license field. There are some creative examples though:
  • "Public domain"
  • "None"
  • "BSD 3-clause"
  • "weeeeeee iam on horse"
  • "GNU LGPL, v2.1 or later"
  • "push button magic"
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JPrankgajop
8 years ago
Huh? And which licence would that be?
quote:

Basically all the models were made for ZK or at least for general use by Spring games.

This is not a licence.
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
8 years ago
I know. I did not claim that they were competent in that regard.
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
8 years ago
Did you want something like this from our legal.txt?

quote:
Unless otherwise specified everything in this project is released under
the GNU General Public License or Public Domain; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,
or any later version.
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JPrankgajop
8 years ago
That might imply that art is also licensed like that: most likely PD, since GPL is for code.
I think having a bunch of license files (GPL, LGPL, legal.txt, LICENCE, etc.) is not helpful as it's not clear what those apply to. It's OK to have a copy of each license, but it's far more important to have an overview of the licensing information for the entire project.
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PLrankAdminSprung
8 years ago
quote:
weeeeeee iam on horse

sounds like a solid license, will remember to use for all my future works
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
8 years ago
quote:
I think having a bunch of license files (GPL, LGPL, legal.txt, LICENCE, etc.) is not helpful as it's not clear what those apply to.
I agree. The licensing for the things I haven't been involved in is annoyingly incompetent. But at least in practice it doesn't matter.
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NOrankKrigsmaskin
7 years ago
So, out of curiosity, if one wanted to use the ambiguously- or non-licensed art assets from Zero-K for a non-related (free/open source) game, what would be the recommended approach to avoid incurring the scorn of devs and community?

* Treat everything as PD and just copy/use whatever.
* Require an installed copy of Zero-K, and use the files from that location.
* Manually or automatically copying files from Zero-K repositories during installation.

First seems rather questionable, and presumably will not win any popularity contests. Second option is certainly legal and is used for many open source game-engine rewrites using original assets. The third option is legally the same as the second, but feels a bit dirtier, especially with automated download since it gives very little exposure for the source of the assets. Attributing assets is a given in all cases.

Any thoughts?
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AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
7 years ago
The closest analogue to a GPL license for art I can find is CC-SA. As our license says everything is GPL unless otherwise stated I'll assume that 2D art is CC-SA. I feel able to do this because almost all of our 2D art was made specifically for either ZK or Spring projects in general. A notable exception is the unitpics, they would inherit their licence from the model they are based on.

I think models and textures can be safely assumed to be at most CC-BY-NC-ND. As far as I can tell nobody tracked individual contributions. If you ask about particular models we may be able to give a better answer.

Sounds have their licensing in a accompanying files for each folder.
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