It's not a problem limited to OGA. It's not about getting rid of OGA. No one wants that. It can't be solved by just making another website. It's a problem within the entire indie gaming community. There are too many artificial barriers simply because someone doesn't want to define if a game is a derivative work or a change in format or simply a performance IN the license text. Every person interested in making games, art for games, or other assets for games would benefit from such an explicit definition.
It appears CC-BY-SA 4.0 doesn't dictate the license of the game if a game is considered a format change. It would if the game is considered a derivative work. So which is it? Obviously we have all heard it both ways! The game dev community needs a license that explicitly states which it is, and for that to become the gold standard.
See, I understand the reason someone might want to use a CC-BY-SA. They made art freely available, and want to promote others to do the same. It makes sense. It's the philosophy behind the open source movement. But the issue comes down to whether or not the asset's license is compatible with the game engine.
It's not about trying to exploit people. This argument is not even about trying to make financial gain from someone else's work (That's what the NC licenses are for). It's about the ability to use the art in software. It's about Epic's answer in the link I provided earlier. That proves that, at least in Epic's eyes, the entire game is considered a derivative. It doesn't matter if that's 100% accurate, what matters is they have control over the usage of their engine, and their legal team interprets the CC-BY-SA license to require releasing the game and game engine source under CC-BY-SA. In practicality, this means that Epic forbids the use of CC-BY-SA assets in any game made with Unreal Engine, since you cannot license your game under a CC-BY-SA license. Doing so would risk the developer losing their license to use the Unreal Engine, regardless of whether or not their interpretation of CC-BY-SA is correct.
I guess the biggest thing that makes everything murky is that no one is pointing to established case law. It appears the courts have yet to weigh in on this issue, or at least no one has noticed if they did.
It doesn't help that the Creative Commons organization doesn't want to take on the issue. It's as if they want to keep the ambiguity, which kind of goes against their own mission statement.
Provide Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works
They really need to explicitly define, in the license text, how ShareAlike works with assets inside a game or software. Then both the game developers and artists would know what the license entails, and can choose licenses and assets appropriately. The other use cases of the license are more self explanatory, like making a derivative in the same format, making a video that uses images, etc. Until then, it may be impossible to make even a free and freely distributable game binary if you use a CC-BY-SA asset, such as those awesome LPC assets that I keep rediscovering and that make me do all of this research all over again.
I guess that's why it seems like everyone's flocking to Godot these days, since it's under the MIT license and they explicitly state you can release your game under any license, you just have to include a statement that your game uses the Godot engine, which is under MIT license. https://godotengine.org/license
But I only use game engines that start with "Un," so until they rename it Undot, I won't use it. Jokes aside, game engines are tools and you pick the best tool for the job, and some engines are better for some games. Sometimes you want to use Unity. Sometimes you want to use Godot. Sometimes you want to use Ren'Py.
My dream would be for OGA and all game asset aggregate sites (I would name a few, not sure if forum rules allow) to do away with the misguided Creative Commons and get together and develop licenses geared for games. There can still be a share alike, just one that carefully defines what sharing alike in the context of a game really means. One that explicitly defines the allowed use in a project that is not compatible with the CC share alike licenses (Unreal, Unity, etc) Credit where credit's due: the OGA-BY license doing exactly that by existing to fix a game specific issue caused by CC-BY, Godot using the MIT license.
I've read all of those except for the last one. I didn't know about the last until now, but I don't have time to read it at the moment. I will take some time tomorrow to read and digest that one.
The Apple thread isn't as relevant as the others, it focuses more on the philosophy of open source, and less on the specifics. It's about helping an artist choose a license and not a developer choose an art, an important distinction when discussing if I'm legally able to use an art vs an artist casually choosing what box to tick when they upload. And it doesn't seem to speak to the specifics, unless I missed something.
The other threads are primarily what led me to the restrictions as I understand them. So in short, you said I was wrong, then posted all the same research I did that led me to think that CC-BY-SA requires the derivative work to have the same license.
CC-BY-SA 4.0 is only one-way compatible with GPL, meaning if I have a derivative work made from a CC-BY-SA 4.0 asset, I may choose to license the derivative under GPL 3.0 instead. But GPL 3.0 seems to still require making the source available (if a binary is distributed), which many developers don't want to do.
It almost seems like many people are encouraged by various online communities (including members here) to attempt a license gridlock where it is uncertain who owns what in hopes that the artist either doesn't mind that you use their art, or can't afford an attorney. I might as well flip a coin, or ask a hundred artists for permission, wait for their response, only to really end up using one singular 8x8 png and waste everyone's time.
Also, I'm sorry for making a new thread, I've seen a few people complain about necro posting and thought a fresh thread was the community expectation.
Unreal Engine was made for FPS games. C++ coding, or use a visual scripting system that's pretty easy to learn. A little cumbersome to use at first, but once you get the basics, it's pretty nice.
Godot has LUA support through https://github.com/perbone/luascript
No idea on how good it is, never used Godot or LUA. Apparently everyone's talking about Godot these days though, it's on my list to try out.
It's not a problem limited to OGA. It's not about getting rid of OGA. No one wants that. It can't be solved by just making another website. It's a problem within the entire indie gaming community. There are too many artificial barriers simply because someone doesn't want to define if a game is a derivative work or a change in format or simply a performance IN the license text. Every person interested in making games, art for games, or other assets for games would benefit from such an explicit definition.
It appears CC-BY-SA 4.0 doesn't dictate the license of the game if a game is considered a format change. It would if the game is considered a derivative work. So which is it? Obviously we have all heard it both ways! The game dev community needs a license that explicitly states which it is, and for that to become the gold standard.
See, I understand the reason someone might want to use a CC-BY-SA. They made art freely available, and want to promote others to do the same. It makes sense. It's the philosophy behind the open source movement. But the issue comes down to whether or not the asset's license is compatible with the game engine.
It's not about trying to exploit people. This argument is not even about trying to make financial gain from someone else's work (That's what the NC licenses are for). It's about the ability to use the art in software. It's about Epic's answer in the link I provided earlier. That proves that, at least in Epic's eyes, the entire game is considered a derivative. It doesn't matter if that's 100% accurate, what matters is they have control over the usage of their engine, and their legal team interprets the CC-BY-SA license to require releasing the game and game engine source under CC-BY-SA. In practicality, this means that Epic forbids the use of CC-BY-SA assets in any game made with Unreal Engine, since you cannot license your game under a CC-BY-SA license. Doing so would risk the developer losing their license to use the Unreal Engine, regardless of whether or not their interpretation of CC-BY-SA is correct.
I guess the biggest thing that makes everything murky is that no one is pointing to established case law. It appears the courts have yet to weigh in on this issue, or at least no one has noticed if they did.
It doesn't help that the Creative Commons organization doesn't want to take on the issue. It's as if they want to keep the ambiguity, which kind of goes against their own mission statement.
Hypocrisy!
They really need to explicitly define, in the license text, how ShareAlike works with assets inside a game or software. Then both the game developers and artists would know what the license entails, and can choose licenses and assets appropriately. The other use cases of the license are more self explanatory, like making a derivative in the same format, making a video that uses images, etc. Until then, it may be impossible to make even a free and freely distributable game binary if you use a CC-BY-SA asset, such as those awesome LPC assets that I keep rediscovering and that make me do all of this research all over again.
I guess that's why it seems like everyone's flocking to Godot these days, since it's under the MIT license and they explicitly state you can release your game under any license, you just have to include a statement that your game uses the Godot engine, which is under MIT license. https://godotengine.org/license
But I only use game engines that start with "Un," so until they rename it Undot, I won't use it. Jokes aside, game engines are tools and you pick the best tool for the job, and some engines are better for some games. Sometimes you want to use Unity. Sometimes you want to use Godot. Sometimes you want to use Ren'Py.
My dream would be for OGA and all game asset aggregate sites (I would name a few, not sure if forum rules allow) to do away with the misguided Creative Commons and get together and develop licenses geared for games. There can still be a share alike, just one that carefully defines what sharing alike in the context of a game really means. One that explicitly defines the allowed use in a project that is not compatible with the CC share alike licenses (Unreal, Unity, etc) Credit where credit's due: the OGA-BY license doing exactly that by existing to fix a game specific issue caused by CC-BY, Godot using the MIT license.
I've read all of those except for the last one. I didn't know about the last until now, but I don't have time to read it at the moment. I will take some time tomorrow to read and digest that one.
The Apple thread isn't as relevant as the others, it focuses more on the philosophy of open source, and less on the specifics. It's about helping an artist choose a license and not a developer choose an art, an important distinction when discussing if I'm legally able to use an art vs an artist casually choosing what box to tick when they upload. And it doesn't seem to speak to the specifics, unless I missed something.
The other threads are primarily what led me to the restrictions as I understand them. So in short, you said I was wrong, then posted all the same research I did that led me to think that CC-BY-SA requires the derivative work to have the same license.
CC-BY-SA 4.0 is only one-way compatible with GPL, meaning if I have a derivative work made from a CC-BY-SA 4.0 asset, I may choose to license the derivative under GPL 3.0 instead. But GPL 3.0 seems to still require making the source available (if a binary is distributed), which many developers don't want to do.
It almost seems like many people are encouraged by various online communities (including members here) to attempt a license gridlock where it is uncertain who owns what in hopes that the artist either doesn't mind that you use their art, or can't afford an attorney. I might as well flip a coin, or ask a hundred artists for permission, wait for their response, only to really end up using one singular 8x8 png and waste everyone's time.
Also, I'm sorry for making a new thread, I've seen a few people complain about necro posting and thought a fresh thread was the community expectation.
Unreal Engine was made for FPS games. C++ coding, or use a visual scripting system that's pretty easy to learn. A little cumbersome to use at first, but once you get the basics, it's pretty nice.
Godot has LUA support through https://github.com/perbone/luascript
No idea on how good it is, never used Godot or LUA. Apparently everyone's talking about Godot these days though, it's on my list to try out.