@Clint Bellanger: Great follow up! Actually, he confirms that they did not really want the work out there as CC-SA-3.0.
If I can get back on the soap box for a minute... ;)
It just goes to show that just as someone can accidentally or unintentionally violate a license, someone can also accidentally or unintentionally choose a license. Let's not be a place that holds people to their mistakes when that happens.
ok, I promise the soap box goes away for awhile now...
@hectavex: no worries, I just didn't want anyone to think they play lightly with the ban-hammer around here.
@Mornedil: Yeah, I think that would be a very popular license if somebody could write it. I think the problem is turning 'Use but don't shamelessly exploit' into proper legalese. ;)
re: CC-BY, just be aware of the anti-DRM bit. Lots of folks have chosen CC-BY without realizing that was in there, to the point where we're actually working on updating the Site FAQ/Submission guidelines to specifically say something about it. So you've seen it, here is the current draft language for that:
CC-BY and CC-SA licenses include a clause prohibiting the use of additional "legal terms or technological measures (DRM) that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits". In practice, this means artwork using this license may not be legally distributed on platforms that use any form of 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM). Note that many popular game distribution networks do use DRM (ie. Apple iOS, Xbox Live, Sony PSN) and others may or may not use DRM depending on how a particular game is pacakged (ex. Steam, Google Android). Please be aware of this when submitting work and/or choosing work to use in a project.
Again, OGA-BY-3.0 was specifically created by Bart to be CC-BY w/o the anti-DRM restriction.
I only mention this because you are specifcally asking about which license to choose and, again, many have missed this part of the CC-BY license in the past.
Whatever license you choose to go with is certainly cool with me, and I applaud you're community spirit, frankly you're aces in my book for sharing your hard work no matter what the license! :)
ps
if you have any other thoughts/comments/suggestions on the site submissions guidelines and/or faq, you're welcome to contribute them to the discussion thread on improving them:
Being a new submitter who struggled choosing a license for you work, your perspective on the site docs would be very helpful to hear.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - 13:48
To put it all another way, we're lucky to live in a time when memory is hyper abundant and even tiny cell phones have gigahertz processors, alot of hard fought battles were waged to get us here, take advantage and program in whatever language you like best!
@Mornedil: I don't think there are any licenses on this site that prevent a work from being re-uploaded somewhere else. You are thinking of something like 'you can do what you want, but you can't re-distribute the work as part of another collection'? The idea being, take my work, do something productive with it, but don't just bundle it with a bunch of other free assets, slap it on a CD and try to charge $9.99 for it. I see riders like that on custom font licenses alot, but none of the big 'free' licenses have stuff like that in there. :(
CC-BY does have the benefit of at least requiring that you be credited for the work, and CC-SA adds the provision that derivative works must be released under the same license. But be aware that both those licenses have a restriction against distributing on platforms that use DRM. OGA has added it's own OGA-BY to the mix which is basically CC-BY without the anti-DRM restriction in there.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - 12:13
I don't know, in this case, I have a hard time seeing it as anything but unethical. The work was so clearly intended as promotional material, for me personally, I just can't see ripping sprites or tiles out of there and not feeling like I was stealing regardless of how they were licensed.
And I do think there's a place for saying that no matter how the work was licensed or distibuted you should still be respectful of the original artists intentions and/or wishes. I guess it's parsing english, but I'd put that somewhere above courtesy. Courtesy is holding the door open for someone, or in this realm, notifying someone when you use their work. It's a good thing to do, but it doesn't make you a bad person if you mess it up or forget to do it sometimes. Ripping someone's work when it was so obviously only intended for promotional use, I think that crosses a different line entirely.
Alright, I'll get off the soapbox now, but not without adding that Nikita himself posted the work with the comment that the original artists would probably be mad if anyone used it in their project, which I think speaks volumes as to whether it was an acceptable submission or not.
@hectavex: Actually, that slowly escalated over the course of about 3 months and 3 weeks. I think the community can honestly say we did the best we could to make space for Nikita here, but in the end he summed it up best, his worldview is just not compatible with OGA's mission and policies. The good news is that the internet is a big place, hopefully he'll find somewhere where his contributions are a better fit.
@Clint Bellanger: I think the message to Free Lives was a good idea and well worded. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but you did a good job explaining the situation and making the site's policy clear.
@mdwh: Yes I agree, it's better without the word 'restriction' in there. So we have:
CC-BY and CC-SA licenses include a clause prohibiting the use of additional "legal terms or technological measures (DRM) that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits". In practice, this means artwork using this license may not be legally distributed on platforms that use any form of 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM). Note that many popular game distribution networks do use DRM (ie. Apple iOS, Xbox Live, Sony PSN) and others may or may not use DRM depending on how a particular game is pacakged (ex. Steam, Google Android). Please be aware of this when submitting work and/or choosing work to use in a project.
I can't see what is even remotely controversial about removing this submission.
It was screenshots and promo art from a commercial game. The fact that it was released as CC-SA is completely irrelevant. I can't see anyone in their right head looking at those and saying, 'Yeah, what these devs wanted was to share their sprites and game logos so they could be used by anyone!'
Ask yourself, is this the kind of work OGA should be hosting? Is this useful to the OGA community? Is this the sort of thing OGA wants to be known for? Ripped sprites and playing legal 'gotcha' with developers?
And that's assuming the sprites were ripped, which they were not even. Again, it's just screenshots and promo art from a commercial game. Heck, two of the screens were the game logo and the developer's logo. Whom does it serve to host that on OGA? Even if they were properly ripped and reformated (which again, they were not!), do you want OGA to be known as the place people go to get those hot BroForce sprite rips?
It takes years to build the trust and reputation OpenGameArt.org has, submissions like this can shatter that in a heartbeat.
I'm guessing you could easily muster a 'If you want to go through our promo shots and rip all the sprites and tiles, more power to you!' from the devs (afterall, what else are they going to say at this point? and I'll point out again that is not even what the submission was!) but I'm with Clint, the standard you should be looking for here is an enthusiastic, 'Yes, please take our sprites, we want to share our work with the creative commons, build on it and be fruitful!' And honestly, it should come from the devs themselves, submitting their own work, as properly formatted sprite sheets. That's the kind of submission that grows the community and builds trust in OGA as a place to go for high quality free and open art, not this third-party submitted 'technically it's legal so you can't stop me' stuff.
@swarupanandadhua: Sound like you are off to a good start actually. Honestly, I would stick with Python and PyGame for now. If you're far enough along with that to do a Space Invaders clone, it won't be much of a leap to do a 2D platformer game. As Olander pointed out, one good benefit of sticking with a lower level approach (as opposed to jumping to a packaged engine like Unity) is that you'll be learning plenty of basic programming skills as you go. I wouldn't worry at all about the difference between using an interpretted vs. a compiled language at this point. Trust me, if you find your Python Super Mario clone doesn't run fast enough, the problem is most likely in your code not in the Python interpretter's speed.
I would second Olander's recommendation of XNA, it's about as slick a game SDK as I've seen and really a shame Microsoft has dropped development on it. That said, I would only worry about making the jump to C#/XNA if you are tiring of Python or just want to try something new out for whatever reason.
Unfortunately, it's been too long since I did anything with Python for me to comment intelligently on your code, but if you have any general game programming or code structure questions, I'd be more than happy to try and help answer them for you, just PM me (you can do that from OGA by clicking on my name next to this comment and then going to the 'Contact' tab).
Saturday, June 13, 2015 - 23:57
Just a note, this one still indicates BipCot NoGov license in the 'Copyright/Attribution Notice'. Also, I notice your profile says all your works are available under the NoGov license. If you indeed intend them to available under NoGov as well as the selected licences (CC-BY), you may want to clarify that they are /also/ available under the NoGov license if folks prefer those terns to the selected license. In fact, if you want to add a note to each of the submissions stating that the works are /also/ available under NoGov, that'd be fine, as long as it's clear that CC-BY is a valid license option.
this is aweomse! would make great title track for any kind of space shooter!
@Clint Bellanger: Great follow up! Actually, he confirms that they did not really want the work out there as CC-SA-3.0.
If I can get back on the soap box for a minute... ;)
It just goes to show that just as someone can accidentally or unintentionally violate a license, someone can also accidentally or unintentionally choose a license. Let's not be a place that holds people to their mistakes when that happens.
ok, I promise the soap box goes away for awhile now...
@hectavex: no worries, I just didn't want anyone to think they play lightly with the ban-hammer around here.
@Clint Bellanger:
ps: i like the new avatar pic!
@Mornedil: Yeah, I think that would be a very popular license if somebody could write it. I think the problem is turning 'Use but don't shamelessly exploit' into proper legalese. ;)
re: CC-BY, just be aware of the anti-DRM bit. Lots of folks have chosen CC-BY without realizing that was in there, to the point where we're actually working on updating the Site FAQ/Submission guidelines to specifically say something about it. So you've seen it, here is the current draft language for that:
CC-BY and CC-SA licenses include a clause prohibiting the use of additional "legal terms or technological measures (DRM) that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits". In practice, this means artwork using this license may not be legally distributed on platforms that use any form of 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM). Note that many popular game distribution networks do use DRM (ie. Apple iOS, Xbox Live, Sony PSN) and others may or may not use DRM depending on how a particular game is pacakged (ex. Steam, Google Android). Please be aware of this when submitting work and/or choosing work to use in a project.
Again, OGA-BY-3.0 was specifically created by Bart to be CC-BY w/o the anti-DRM restriction.
I only mention this because you are specifcally asking about which license to choose and, again, many have missed this part of the CC-BY license in the past.
Whatever license you choose to go with is certainly cool with me, and I applaud you're community spirit, frankly you're aces in my book for sharing your hard work no matter what the license! :)
ps
if you have any other thoughts/comments/suggestions on the site submissions guidelines and/or faq, you're welcome to contribute them to the discussion thread on improving them:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/site-faqsubmission-guidelines-updatesc...
Being a new submitter who struggled choosing a license for you work, your perspective on the site docs would be very helpful to hear.
To put it all another way, we're lucky to live in a time when memory is hyper abundant and even tiny cell phones have gigahertz processors, alot of hard fought battles were waged to get us here, take advantage and program in whatever language you like best!
@Mornedil: I don't think there are any licenses on this site that prevent a work from being re-uploaded somewhere else. You are thinking of something like 'you can do what you want, but you can't re-distribute the work as part of another collection'? The idea being, take my work, do something productive with it, but don't just bundle it with a bunch of other free assets, slap it on a CD and try to charge $9.99 for it. I see riders like that on custom font licenses alot, but none of the big 'free' licenses have stuff like that in there. :(
CC-BY does have the benefit of at least requiring that you be credited for the work, and CC-SA adds the provision that derivative works must be released under the same license. But be aware that both those licenses have a restriction against distributing on platforms that use DRM. OGA has added it's own OGA-BY to the mix which is basically CC-BY without the anti-DRM restriction in there.
I don't know, in this case, I have a hard time seeing it as anything but unethical. The work was so clearly intended as promotional material, for me personally, I just can't see ripping sprites or tiles out of there and not feeling like I was stealing regardless of how they were licensed.
And I do think there's a place for saying that no matter how the work was licensed or distibuted you should still be respectful of the original artists intentions and/or wishes. I guess it's parsing english, but I'd put that somewhere above courtesy. Courtesy is holding the door open for someone, or in this realm, notifying someone when you use their work. It's a good thing to do, but it doesn't make you a bad person if you mess it up or forget to do it sometimes. Ripping someone's work when it was so obviously only intended for promotional use, I think that crosses a different line entirely.
Alright, I'll get off the soapbox now, but not without adding that Nikita himself posted the work with the comment that the original artists would probably be mad if anyone used it in their project, which I think speaks volumes as to whether it was an acceptable submission or not.
@hectavex: Actually, that slowly escalated over the course of about 3 months and 3 weeks. I think the community can honestly say we did the best we could to make space for Nikita here, but in the end he summed it up best, his worldview is just not compatible with OGA's mission and policies. The good news is that the internet is a big place, hopefully he'll find somewhere where his contributions are a better fit.
@Clint Bellanger: I think the message to Free Lives was a good idea and well worded. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but you did a good job explaining the situation and making the site's policy clear.
@mdwh: Yes I agree, it's better without the word 'restriction' in there. So we have:
CC-BY and CC-SA licenses include a clause prohibiting the use of additional "legal terms or technological measures (DRM) that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits". In practice, this means artwork using this license may not be legally distributed on platforms that use any form of 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM). Note that many popular game distribution networks do use DRM (ie. Apple iOS, Xbox Live, Sony PSN) and others may or may not use DRM depending on how a particular game is pacakged (ex. Steam, Google Android). Please be aware of this when submitting work and/or choosing work to use in a project.
I can't see what is even remotely controversial about removing this submission.
It was screenshots and promo art from a commercial game. The fact that it was released as CC-SA is completely irrelevant. I can't see anyone in their right head looking at those and saying, 'Yeah, what these devs wanted was to share their sprites and game logos so they could be used by anyone!'
Ask yourself, is this the kind of work OGA should be hosting? Is this useful to the OGA community? Is this the sort of thing OGA wants to be known for? Ripped sprites and playing legal 'gotcha' with developers?
And that's assuming the sprites were ripped, which they were not even. Again, it's just screenshots and promo art from a commercial game. Heck, two of the screens were the game logo and the developer's logo. Whom does it serve to host that on OGA? Even if they were properly ripped and reformated (which again, they were not!), do you want OGA to be known as the place people go to get those hot BroForce sprite rips?
It takes years to build the trust and reputation OpenGameArt.org has, submissions like this can shatter that in a heartbeat.
I'm guessing you could easily muster a 'If you want to go through our promo shots and rip all the sprites and tiles, more power to you!' from the devs (afterall, what else are they going to say at this point? and I'll point out again that is not even what the submission was!) but I'm with Clint, the standard you should be looking for here is an enthusiastic, 'Yes, please take our sprites, we want to share our work with the creative commons, build on it and be fruitful!' And honestly, it should come from the devs themselves, submitting their own work, as properly formatted sprite sheets. That's the kind of submission that grows the community and builds trust in OGA as a place to go for high quality free and open art, not this third-party submitted 'technically it's legal so you can't stop me' stuff.
@swarupanandadhua: Sound like you are off to a good start actually. Honestly, I would stick with Python and PyGame for now. If you're far enough along with that to do a Space Invaders clone, it won't be much of a leap to do a 2D platformer game. As Olander pointed out, one good benefit of sticking with a lower level approach (as opposed to jumping to a packaged engine like Unity) is that you'll be learning plenty of basic programming skills as you go. I wouldn't worry at all about the difference between using an interpretted vs. a compiled language at this point. Trust me, if you find your Python Super Mario clone doesn't run fast enough, the problem is most likely in your code not in the Python interpretter's speed.
I would second Olander's recommendation of XNA, it's about as slick a game SDK as I've seen and really a shame Microsoft has dropped development on it. That said, I would only worry about making the jump to C#/XNA if you are tiring of Python or just want to try something new out for whatever reason.
Unfortunately, it's been too long since I did anything with Python for me to comment intelligently on your code, but if you have any general game programming or code structure questions, I'd be more than happy to try and help answer them for you, just PM me (you can do that from OGA by clicking on my name next to this comment and then going to the 'Contact' tab).
Just a note, this one still indicates BipCot NoGov license in the 'Copyright/Attribution Notice'.
Also, I notice your profile says all your works are available under the NoGov license. If you indeed intend them to available under NoGov as well as the selected licences (CC-BY), you may want to clarify that they are /also/ available under the NoGov license if folks prefer those terns to the selected license. In fact, if you want to add a note to each of the submissions stating that the works are /also/ available under NoGov, that'd be fine, as long as it's clear that CC-BY is a valid license option.
All that said, this is another awesome track!
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