Hello, On 10.03.2014 04:12, Bas Wijnen wrote: > On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 02:52:33PM +0100, Markus Koschany wrote: >> The question is what are the rules > > Yes, this is the discussion. Or more accurately, what we want the rules > to be. The rules currently aren't very clear, and the games team is > likely the most affected party in this. So we should make the rules for > ourselves, and propose them as project-wide rules after we find that > they work well. Thanks for admitting that the current rules need clarification. >> You don't concede that artwork is not software. In my opinion they are >> not the same and there is a reason why licenses like CC-BY-SA exist and >> not just the GPL. You completely ignore the fact that art is useful >> in many ways > > I too disagree with you about that. Like (other) art, code can also be > "useful in many ways" even if you have no source. That doesn't mean > anything. In particular, it doesn't mean we should accept code without > source in main. Not sure what you mean by "code without source" but a program without source is of course not useful at all. My point was that there is by definition a clear distinction between a program and digital art (artwork). The term "source" in regard to programs and digital art is not unambiguous. I'm fully aware that some people don't distinguish between both terms. However there is an obvious gap between what is claimed to be "de jure" and what is de facto a common practice in Debian. That's all I wanted to say. And now we are at the beginning of the discussion again. You should also take a look at CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported. You won't find any mention of the words "program", "software" or "source". Another obvious hint that CC-BY-SA was designed as a license for digital artwork and its demands but not for programmatic works. Since the ftp-masters accepted CC-BY-SA 3.0 as a DFSG free license we should also acknowledge that different things, have different needs but they can still be DFSG compliant. I do also think like Simon [1] that there is value in being less strict about the "preferred form of modification" because I also see the real risk that packaging games and other multimedia assets may become extremely difficult if the same rules as for Red Eclipse apply to all games. In short we need a better definition of the term source for digital artwork that works in practical terms and not only in theory. >> and that "source code" is something intrinsic to software. > > It is? Then what are the gimp and blender scripts that I use to > generate the gfpoken pngs? I call them source code. Yes, source code is a term I expect to read in every definition about programs or software. I also had a look at gfpoken. Obviously you provide the source code of your shell scripts that generate some pngs from one blend and one xcf file. But it seems you don't provide the sources of the other pic*.png files under your png directory. And now compare your game with Red Eclipse. Gfpoken, free or non-free, what do you think? > But if you don't agree with me on this, then I'm not sure what I think > of Red Eclipse. I thought we did agree, and trusted your judgement. Thanks for trusting my judgment but it's always better to form a personal opinion. Nevertheless I hope we both come to the same conclusion. > What sort of problems are the reason it isn't in main? I guess you should take a look at Martin's comments in debian/copyright of the redeclipse-data package and compare the data with other packages in main. >> I can replace images without touching a single line of source code. > > I can replace executables without touching code as well. How is that > relevant? You need the source code of a program to change its programmatic behaviour but you don't need e.g. some kind of vector source of a raster image to make the game look different. It is always possible to make modifications to a raster image as well. Thanks for creating https://wiki.debian.org/Games/Source. I have updated the page with some opinions which were voiced in the last threads. I would suggest that we add some more opinions and statements from old threads there and start to streamline everything after that. >> My impression is that you are very demanding, a free software theorist >> and someone who is literally everywhere to point out others mistakes. >> [...] > > I understand that you are a bit angry, but please be respectful. > Everybody is trying to do what is best. We can disagree about how to do > that, but we should remain polite. (I think this post might also cause > a similar reaction, and I tried to avoid that. If I didn't succeed, I > apologize; I do not intend to offend you.) I wasn't one bit angry back then but I uphold my criticism. I'm always open for improving the status quo and I'm also willing to help but we need more than words to achieve a practical solution. >> otherwise someday we are going to have the perfect distribution but >> nobody uses it. > > Our previous issue arose from my impression that you asked the question > "how much non-free files may be in a package until it can no longer go > in main?" You said you didn't ask that question, but this sounds to me > like you are talking about a distribution with no non-free components > (which is perfect), but with so little components that it is unusable. > So we should relax our requirements (on availability of source) to make > the system usable. > > You said before this was not what you meant, so I'll believe you, but > please explain what you do mean, because I can't read it any other way. That's not really what I implied with the sentence you quoted above. I just wanted to say that we need a practical solution for the source of artwork question. Regards, Markus [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2014/03/msg00041.html
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