Looking for reviews swaps

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 11:04:22 UTC 2009


On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:53:25 +0200, Ralf wrote:

> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:29:03 +0200, Ralf wrote:
> > 
> >> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> >>> On Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:56:09 +0200, Ralf wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hans de Goede wrote:
> >>>>> Hi All,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I've just packaged this cool recently set free old style
> >>>>> adventure game drascula, including music and subtitles
> >>>>> in French, German, Spanish and Italian.
> >>>> Well I am reading this in drascula-music's readme.txt:
> >>>>
> >>>>  > 3) You may not charge a fee for the game itself. This includes
> >>>>  > reselling the
> >>>>  > game as an individual item.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sounds like a "non-free" package to me.
> >>>  2) You may charge a reasonable copying fee for this archive, and may
> >>> distribute it in aggregate as part of a larger and possibly commercial software
> >>> distribution (such as a Linux distribution or magazine coverdisk).
> >> == you may distribute it as part of Fedora.
> > 
> > No, as part of "a larger and possibly commercial software distribution".
> 
> IMO, this "license" is self contradicting => Likely illegal and likely void.

Well, I could agree with that, also because it is much too vague, and
lawyers might laugh about the licence terms. The [albeit not legally
binding] preamble of the licence explains the intent. They want to
restrict commercial exploitation of the game data files by declaring some
forms of sale of the game as illegal. According to the preamble, selling a
commercial collection of games including this one would be illegal. One
could not put together such a collection based on ScummVM (as the game
data are useless without an engine like SCUMM). Nevertheless, it's lawyers
and the FSF (as consulted) to decide whether this thing is considered
"free enough", for Fedora or in general.

> >> The clause I cited, restricts commercial use of the SW itself. One of 
> >> the basic freedoms of open source software.
> > 
> > It's content, not code.
> 
> Any content is also "source"-code at the same time.  It's a matter of 
> use-case. It's essentially the same thing as fonts, images etc. In this 
> case it's "audio artworks."

Note that game data uses the same licence text.




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