I feel like I should chime in here briefly to say that, yes, I still exist, and I'm doing fine. The lack of updates on my part is due to a lack of time and not a lack of inclination.
I'm trying to keep a better eye on things here, but I'm going to be intermittent at best for a while. If there are other people here who do have both the time and inclination to work on the site code, I'd be willing to talk about that.
@p0ss: I just wanted to say thanks a bunch for stepping up to the plate on the search and popular items. Is there anything I can set up for you that will make what you're doing easier? SSH access, etc?
This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
Licenses other than the GPL
Opinions about how copyright law, licensing, and/or the GPL ought to work (as opposed to how it does work)
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
It's been bouncing around by $150, sometimes from minute to minute. I have no idea what the deal is with it, although in all honest I doubt it's the Patreon hack that caused it. Most likely a software bug. I'll find out what the real number is next time I collect Patreon funds, which will be at the end of the year.
no, I use a unique password for each site, which already makes my head dizzy. But why didn't we get an email about that, if there is something known about
I figured the announcement on the front page would suffice, although that was probably a bad call on my part. I'll see what I can do about sending out a mass mail.
Anyway, if you're using a unique password on OGA, then the only information they could have gotten is anything you've entered on the site. Since we don't even ask for your real name, I'm guessing that the only thing of interest to hackers would be your email (which is known to be compromised, since they emailed everyone) and your password (which is hashed and in your case unique to OGA).
I don't know for certain what all information they got, but it seems likely that if they were able to get a list of email addresses that they may have also been able to get at hashed passwords. I'm in the middle of running a scan on the server (it went all night and it's about half done), and it hasn't turned up anything yet.
Edit: Just to be clear, we don't store any Paypal or other payment account information here on OGA. Even though the email mentiones "Peypal", it doesn't mean they got any credit card or bank information. That being said, if your paypal or bank account uses the same email and password that you use on OGA, I strongly recommend that you change them immediately.
Hey folks,
I feel like I should chime in here briefly to say that, yes, I still exist, and I'm doing fine. The lack of updates on my part is due to a lack of time and not a lack of inclination.
I'm trying to keep a better eye on things here, but I'm going to be intermittent at best for a while. If there are other people here who do have both the time and inclination to work on the site code, I'd be willing to talk about that.
@p0ss: I just wanted to say thanks a bunch for stepping up to the plate on the search and popular items. Is there anything I can set up for you that will make what you're doing easier? SSH access, etc?
Bart
This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
My experince with recaptcha is that it actually lets in far, far more spam.
It's been bouncing around by $150, sometimes from minute to minute. I have no idea what the deal is with it, although in all honest I doubt it's the Patreon hack that caused it. Most likely a software bug. I'll find out what the real number is next time I collect Patreon funds, which will be at the end of the year.
That was actually me. I was verifying to someone I was talking to on the internet that I was who I said I was. :)
Anyway, I deleted it, since it's served its purpose.
no, I use a unique password for each site, which already makes my head dizzy. But why didn't we get an email about that, if there is something known about
I figured the announcement on the front page would suffice, although that was probably a bad call on my part. I'll see what I can do about sending out a mass mail.
Anyway, if you're using a unique password on OGA, then the only information they could have gotten is anything you've entered on the site. Since we don't even ask for your real name, I'm guessing that the only thing of interest to hackers would be your email (which is known to be compromised, since they emailed everyone) and your password (which is hashed and in your case unique to OGA).
There's a blog post about this on the front page.
I don't know for certain what all information they got, but it seems likely that if they were able to get a list of email addresses that they may have also been able to get at hashed passwords. I'm in the middle of running a scan on the server (it went all night and it's about half done), and it hasn't turned up anything yet.
Edit: Just to be clear, we don't store any Paypal or other payment account information here on OGA. Even though the email mentiones "Peypal", it doesn't mean they got any credit card or bank information. That being said, if your paypal or bank account uses the same email and password that you use on OGA, I strongly recommend that you change them immediately.
Email is still being sent just fine. We were on a couple of spam blacklists, and I contested it and had us taken off.
@andmyman404: Where are you searching for this stuff? That sounds useful.
Looks neat. Is there someone we can read about it and download it?
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