New licensing options on commissioned art
Hey folks!
We've come to the decision that all the art that OGA commissions (are that OGA paid for) from here on should be licensed CC-BY, in addition to CC-BY-SA and GPL. We figure that not having the share-alike requirement will make it easier for indie projects to include our art without worrying about the legal implications of a share-alike license. Some of our older commissions (namely the anime base sprites) have been changed to include this option as well. Over the next few weeks, we'll contact the artists who worked on other commissioned works and ask them for permission to make this change.
For those of you who aren't intimiately familiar with the various CC licenses, CC-BY only requires you to include an attribution in your credits (including a link to OGA), which should be easy for everyone.
If you use our CC-BY art in your games, we would of course appreciate it if you contributed some art back to OGA, but that is by no means required. Just a link in your credits is enough. :)
Peace,
Bart
Comments
As I didn't notice any conversations or threads about this topic, I am quite surprised that you're in favor of no copyleft. Given the choice of using media under the CC-BY license opens the media to all use and while you still will be attributed, you are likely not to being even able to copy/share the modification of your own work (neglecting all the other rights you lose once you use licenses without copyleft).
To me it is a decision similar to changing a project license from GPL to BSD. Of course you give the decision to the artist, but to me it feels strange you encourage this. Do you really want to make Opengameart a place for commercial indie game developers?
Just to be perfectly sure about this: while I as always keep my own opinion towards licensing issues, I respect your decisions and want to know what you re up to. Just to be informed what this now means :)
bye,
remaxim
OGA is still, and always will be, primarily meant for Open Source projects. Note that I'm not including any of the many weird licenses that allow commercial use but prevent use in FOSS.
I'm a bit surprised at your implication that I don't understand what it means to release the commissioned art under CC-BY, given the amount of time and effort I've had to put into learning about licensing to run this site. I realize that it does, in fact, essentially lift the share-alike requirement of the GPL and CC-BY-SA on those particular pieces of art. However, a number of people (myself included) have made the determination that the additional publicity from opening the art up for wider use will bring in more new art than retaining the share-alike requirement. While I've seen our commissioned art used in FOSS projects (which is great), I have yet to see any be modified and contributed back. The modifications to our commissioned art have all been due to contests and challenges and such.
Just to clarify this for other people reading: We are not relicensing all of the art on the site -- just the art that OGA has specifically paid for and the artists (who retain their copyright per OGA policy) give us permission to relicense. This is not a general change in the way the site works.
Bart
Hopefully the desired effect will take place. I'm optimistic that it will. :)
PS: Add lgpl for good measure? (not really sure)
As an artist, what I'd really like is for people to actually use the art I contribute, and I feel like CC-BY is what will interest developers of all sorts most (other than PD, of course, but yeah). I feel like the requirement that OGA be linked to in the credits (which goes with commissions, but which I would recommend otherwise as well) limits people from some of the more ridiculous possibilities, anyway.
How exactly would the LGPL be better than GPL in this situation?
If someone specifically asks for it, that's fine. Honestly, though, I'm pretty sure the LGPL is by far our least-used license, and we're really only including the GPL for the few projects that only accept GPLed art.
The real reason I contribute stuff is I want to share it with [b]everyone[/b]. And I've run into a lot of indie developers who'd love to use my stuff, but can't because some library or whatever they're using isn't GPL, or somesuch thing. The GPL is this sort of walled-garden where the only other stuff you can use has to be GPL, (or be so completely public-domain that you can relicense it as GPL).
So I'm really starting to get leery of using the GPL, because it defeats the whole purpose of making my stuff open-source (besides dual-licensing situations).
Honestly, I side with ESR on this whole issue. Open-source doesn't need "compulsion" of the GPL variety to promulgate the open-source movement. We don't need a legal requirement, because being open-source, on its own, just wins because of its own natural strength. It's just a faster, more competitive way to make software - and results in much less buggy software.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=928
In the short run I agree to you, and often I have thought about licensing my stuff completely permissive too.
But the real strength of the GPL is based on the long term network effects! And as long as you play by the specific rules the GPL isn't all that different from a permissive license (e.g. your walled garden analogy, just that when the walled garden is big enough you will not notice that you are restrained).
To further elaborate it: There was an interesting article on slashdot I thing a few months back (sorry can't find the link) explaining why Linux is working well while OpenBSD never really took off. They put the blame on OpenBSD's permissive license. Not only does the GPL allow commercial companies to cooperate in a "save place" with mutual benefits, but the permissive nature of the BSD license has led to many ruptures, forks and abstraction of code from the project. Especially the latter is highly problematic. If for example a company decided to use a certain subsystem of the project (and even hires the main developer), the GPLed project benefits, while the BSD project fails. Looking at the history of both projects, this was clearly the case several times.
To come back to a more game centric argument. Sure some indies might now decided not to use some art because of it's license, but if decided to do then the entire network effect starts. They might need to use an open source alternative for a license, which is currently maybe a bit worse than the commercial version, but the additions the indi project now does to it makes it better.
An indi might chose to use a copyleft rig for their models to save time, and then by contributing animations (no extra work by then) they help myriads of other projects for free, and so on and so forth. And if fact it is very likely that this feeds back into their projects sooner or later.
What we really need is not a move to a more permissive licenses, but a change in understanding that the GPL is not anti-business or prohibits commercial use, but by the contrary is very much pro business and perfectly compatible with for-pay projects.
There is nothing communist about it ;)
What is does though is that the business becomes more about end-products while middle-ware and tools are developed cooperatively. This also lowers the entry barriers for new players on the markets, thus destabilizing monopolies and cartels and speeding up innovation in general.
Yes, and you missed the entire point of my post: That network effect still happens [b]without legal compulsion[/b].
Smart companies and people realize they benefit more from releasing stuff freely that they got publicly - because only by doing so, can they get the public to improve it for free. Dumb companies don't, but they're quickly out-innovated by the googles of our current startup crop.
If a company making a closed-source fork of a BSD-license project is sufficient to kill the free-license fork of the project, then the community was not providing a significant amount of work on it. If OSS actually works, that shouldn't be any threat to a project - no company should be able to keep up with how fast the free version of the software is improving.