Games have to have both freely (as in freedom) licensed game data and code

[qubodupMember]

This is a follow-up to Issue 66 “Andor’s Trail is non-free” in which I request the removal of Andor’s Trail.

Games have to have both freely (as in freedom) licensed game data, it is not enough that the source code is free. The game data license – just like the icon license in production software – has to be freely licensed and allow the four freedoms. Andor’s Trail does not give these four freedoms to anyone.

(Up-front warning: there is no license called “Creative Commons”. “Creative Commons Licenses” are very different. Some of them are non-free, some are free as in freedom.)

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by  qubodup.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by  qubodup.

[mjwMember]

Looking at Debian and their guildlines seems to be reasonable. The are very strict about this. They don’t even ship Manuals with “invariant sections” in their main repo.

The other important resource to look at would be the FSF. For them it’s okay to ship unfree “non-functional data” and call oneself a free distribution.[0]

As a compromise we could make “ships with unfree data” an anti-feature.

Looking forward to the discussion. 😉

[0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html

[qubodupMember]

How sad to read that FSF doesn’t seem to care about the concept of “free as in freedom data” in free software. I guess they have to focus on what they know.

In the case of Andor’s Trail, there is no data license given to 3rd parties. The license info file states that the project is allowed to use them but there’s no info about permission of distribution for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

As long as there is no info on permission to distribute the game data, the game should be kept out of FDroid.

[h2Member]

I do think game data should be free as in freedom, but I also think it is a different issue than non-free software.
Non-Free game data does not compromise my device’s security and my data’s privacy. It doesn’t actually do anything.

Classifying it as an anti-feature would be ok, from my point of view. If we were to accept Debian’s guidelines would also have to remove Firefox, and probably a lot else, which I don’t think is necessary or smart.

[daithib8Member]

I agree with h2 . It is hard enough to be accurate regarding the code licence with the resources that we have. However we should seek to encourage use of free codecs and artwork in some way.

We should make it clearer though that a licence may not apply to resources. Is it sufficient to have eg GPLv2 written in the list with a little footnote in the description about non-free icons? I think not. Still, anybody can contribute description clarifications if they feel like. The about section of the website should mention something; also the wiki, for developers.

A separate license that covers bundled/network artwork/content doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

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