Yes, but this stuff is made for games and open-source games use the GPL. So this is the best way as no license mixing is involved. Isn't that basically what you are saying too? 

but not all open source games use the GPL. That's the bit where the problems start.

What you are saying is true only if you assume the whole environment is GPL.

Quake, for example, is different. Most mods don't use the GPL. The sounds don't use the GPL, nor do the models, skins or textures.

What I'm saying is that if you make stuff, and you want your stuff be universally usable, the GPL is not the best way to go. Public Domain is the best way to go.

GPL is the best way to go if you want your stuff to only be used in a GPL environment (ie, restrict it).

Of course there are two sides to this medal. You just pointed out the other one. 

I acknowledge that I have been very GPL zealous in the past. But I got older and more experienced :)

As an example:

(...) That, however, doesn�t change the fact that I find a position which actively tries to discourage proprietary software to be wrong, both from a practical and MORAL standpoint (hey, if Stallman can use the language of morality, so can I). I posed the following scenario in the Talkbacks to my previous blog. Say a borough or neighborhood decides they want to build a park. Since parks involve both allocations of land and resources to buy park equipment, they aren�t cheap, so the community must decide how to build something that suits everyone in the neighborhood.

Now, assume there is a group in that neighborhood who is vegetarian. Further, this group isn�t just vegetarian, but has a strong dislike for those who aren�t vegetarian. Therefore, they insist that no one be allowed to eat meat while in the park (they managed to get those who insisted that no one who eats meat anywhere, in the park or otherwise, to back down). If the neighborhood doesn�t agree to these terms, they will go off and build a park that is exclusively vegetarian, cost inefficiencies and wasted space be damned.

They have a right to do that, as it is their money they will spend on the park. Why, however, does the fact that others eat meat affect the decision not to eat meat among vegetarians? Further, however many ways you slice it, an exclusivity stance is wasteful of human effort, as now the neighborhood will have two parks. (...)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1707 

I thought you meant a typical (more restricting) CC license. I am all pro-"full-freedom" too. 

especially when it comes to assets(?) like sounds, textures, code snippets etc. 

Turns out I was too naive about creative commons licenses, too. Let's see:

CC Attribution license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").

CC Attribution-ShareAlike License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Japan).

Spot the difference. The part in bold is the problem. 

the bold part is what makes it a "share-alike" license. CC has a lot of licenses, their goal is to provide content creators with choices about how to license their work. I'm not suprised that some of them are similar to the GPL.

I think the real grey area for these sorts of licenses is whether a larger work, made by assembling small pieces, is also bound by the terms of the small pieces.

i.e. if a .map is released under GPL, does and some mod uses it, does the entire mod have to be GPL, or do they merely have to re-release the .map source for the specific .bsp that was derived from the original .map?

To me the latter interpretation feels right, i mean otherwise a GPL quake engine can't be used to make a game where the art and levels are proprietery, but the engine source is released.

Therefore I would imagine that a GPL sound would merely require you to re-license any sounds or music based on it, not every level, texture, and model in your game that uses that sound. 

I guess the issue is static vs. dynamic linking. Any modern game has external data files that contain the art, music, sounds, etc, and these are "linked" at runtime, which is the reason (in my opinion) they don't get tainted by the same license as the engine code. And vice versa -- the engine doesn't get tainted by the license attached to the content it loads.

Doing some google searches, it sounds like the question of closed-source software dynamically linking to GPL software is somewhat contentious. One argument is that even if dynamic linking produces a derivative work, that work is created by the user at run-time, not by the software developer. I think the answer to this question would also answer the question of a proprietary game/mod that uses GPL content. 

The Creative Commons especially before 3.0 can be kind of a mess and requires a lot of overhead.

I read a critique of the CC by the Debian Linux people and an explanation of the strings with CC by a MMORPG game company.

There are a lot of hidden strings and caveats and CC licenses unlike the GPL aren't automatically updated to be compatible with a new version.

This means Creative Commons 2, 2.5 and 3 are incompatible with each other.

The CC is good for standalone works, but sucks for collaborative works or anything that is going to mix and match content. 

To all of you closed-source cunts who are exploiting the open-source bedrock of code released by fans in support of a nonprofit niche audience: fuck off. 

Your generic, smoldering rage notwithstanding ... who are you raging against specifically? 

Well, having decided that actually reading and comprehending the debate would take too much time, he saw the words GPL and open source and tried some fairly ineffective flame baiting. Just ignore the trolling and continue the conversation at something above pre-school level...

Speaking of which, does that really mean that you can just load whatever you want to keep non-open source at runtime without infringing the license (under either/both CC or GPL). So you could effectively sell a Quake if you created entirely new art content and just released the engine code/any improvements to it. (mebe something like Urban Terror the previously Q3 mod would be a better example, would they be able to sell that if they wanted?)

(ps. j0 momz) 

Apparently the word 'mod' is missing from that post. I'll leave you to work out where ;p

(I think it was kidnapped by evile rockers tbh) 

does that really mean that you can just load whatever mod you want to keep non-open source at runtime

Is it!? Is that where it was?!?!? :DDDD

Did I get it right?! 

A rotfish? 

No. Fail. 

And the prize is a test tube of Shambler's piss once I recieve my damn prize from the twat competition... 

Therefore I would imagine that a GPL sound would merely require you to re-license any sounds or music based on it, not every level, texture, and model in your game that uses that sound.

Yeah, but that is enough of a problem.

Of course it's a somewhat academic problem, since I probably may not alter id's sounds, for example, legally, in the first place :-P

Even mixing a CC-Attribution-Sharealike sound with a GPL sound produces a conflict - both licenses want the derivative work for themselves. Free software cunts struggling about who gets to limit my freedom.

The dynamic linking thing (engine, pak files...) might be a loophole, but mixing sound files is a pretty static thing. Unless you create a temporary entity that plays the GPL sound at the right time, on a free channel (mixing at runtime, using the engine as a mixer). You then have a derivative work that only exists for a short time - it's performed live in a way and only recorded by the player's brain.

...

see? Your brain must be GPLed. Wait, that creates a license conflict.

But yeah, it's academic. Half the Quake mods out there violate some license. Luckily, they're a fringe phenomenon and their authors neither make nor have money. Most of those mods are also history.

I just found the vegatarian story pretty funny. :) 

well it's a funny place we're in. I'm planning on releasing the rubicon2 source, but i can't put any real license on it (GPL or otherwise) because it comes from sources that have no real license, such as the original progs source, the hipnotic source, and the custents source. They are merely released with the informal "you can use it to make quake mods" agreement. In fact the hipnotic code says at the top: "Do not distribute." So how did I get it then?

And then in the realm of sound effects, i have a mixed bag of modified id sounds, a couple sounds from quake2, and a couple original sounds i made. Then I have considered using some legal GPL or CC sounds too, but it's funny because I will be sure to follow those licenses correctly even while having the stolen game sounds mentioned above, for which I'm obviously not using the license correctly. 

The few, the proud, the people that make a Quake mod.

Licenses are a fad, by 2300 they'll look back and view us as silly cavepeople in an embryonic stage of human thought. 

I updated my website and the readme files of my maps a few months ago, all my maps are released under the GPL. The map files are included in the zip archives.

http://maps.sp1r1t.org 

I took all the Q1 GPL map sources and made a zip of the zip. List of authors: Vondur, RPG, Negke, Jago, Tyrann, Metlslime, Lunaran, "other" Spirit, id1 (plus Aquashark's "fixed" id1 map sources, the "end" map wasn't quite like the end.bsp) and the OQ maps.

License for Warpspasm .map source sounds near public domain so included that too.

http://www.quake-1.com/files/maps/gpl_q1maps_all_known.zip

Annoyingly, this took 1.5 hours to do (tracking them down, download, broken links, etc ...)

Next time:

Find Trinca's map sources and include, maybe assemble all the Q3 open source ones (Nexuiz, RPG, Lunaran, Sock, whoever else ...) and maybe even Q2 ones as well (Metlslime). 

my speedmaps also have sources released, but i guess there's no link to them on my website... i'll hae to find the url when i get home. 

aderlass zip is broken. So is neg3beta (which is a DM map anyway). Incidentally, I repackaged all my DM map scraps into a single zip just yesterday. 

Here they are: sm37 sm49 sm55 sm60 sm74 sm80