[CF-Devel] New Dragon Pic

Mark Wedel mwedel at sonic.net
Fri Nov 23 01:42:32 CST 2001


 My personal thought is that all pieces of crossfire should be under the GPL. 
This includes images, maps, code changes, etc.

 I have several reasons:
1) Consistency with crossfire as a whole - having a potentially large number of
images/maps/whatever with different policies would prove very annoying.  Just
trying to notify people that this image is restricted but that is not.  Could
you imagine if this was the protocol with some xpm images when we converted them
to png?  In theory, we would need to require the authors permission for that.

2) Consistency with open source principals.  It seems at least somewhat possible
that if people can attach limitations to what they contribute, more people may
do so.  I can't give precise examples, but I am sure crossfire has borrowed
various pieces from other open source applications - it would be somewhat
facetious to do that and say other people can't use pieces of our software.  I
would also have to check, but sourceforge may have rules about what they host
(eg, opensource applications, and not those with specific redistribution rules)

3) Maintainability - if you have to check with people to make changes, or even
need to check various files to see if something might be encumbered, it could
prove to be a real pain.

 I would also thing that some aspects of his copyright would be highly suspect. 
Is use allowed in the client?  Suppose someone makes a different server, which
is a pay per server, but uses a compatibile client protocol?

 For those reasons,  I really think anything in CVS should be under GPL.  Now
you could very well have some sets of maps or images with more restrictive rules
that people could download if they want to.

    
    


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