Matricks also asked me to post his remarks on the licensing situation: "I thought I just might clear some things up. In the eyes of the public the Teeworlds (previously known as Teewars) is soon to turn 1 year old. Behind the curtains the project have a history of about 6 concrete years. I've written many version of the game and tried out many different things but it never mounted to a public release. When I wrote (from scratch) this version of Teeworlds I had one thing in mind, develop the game and nothing else. My intention were always to release it as open source so anyone that wanted could help and also so it could be played on various platforms that I don't have access to. Being open source haven't really given any real benefits for the project so far and I believe that I might have opened the source prematurely. The game might have benefited from being closed a while longer and giving me more time to just concentrate on developing the game but closing the source now is of cause to late and will just hurt the game even more. 0.1.x and 0.2.x were released without the source. 0.3.x were released with source but under a very strict license with the intention to change it in the future. The 0.4.x license (the current) were constructed with some of my private wishes and formulated by a license expert at Fedora (communicates to this guy where done through proxy guy) to make sure that I didn't step on anyones toes, which seams like it didn't help at all. The much discussed point 4 is my expressed wish and partly due to some of the troubled past with Teeworlds (don't ask, http://www.teeworlds.com/?page=journal&id=942). Also, I work at a game development house which complicates everything a bit when it comes to involvement of money. As long as it's a hobby thing it's not a problem. I don't really care about publicity, money etc, but I do care deeply about the game and what to see it materialized. Lately I've gotten less and less time to do actual work on the game (I'm only active coder on it) because of the color of the bike shed (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed) and getting kinda tired of it (not only the license question). This is something I've realized and started to move over more responsibility to other people that I can trust and can deal with it. I'm sorry if I've offended anyone, I should have acted more professional. As for point 4, it will stay until I can figure out exactly how to deal with it. It can perhaps (read likely) be removed in the future but for now it stays due to various reasons. These things take time. Cheers, Magnus "matricks" Auvinen btw, Debian rocks! We use it on our server, my home server and I use xubuntu on my desktop at home :) " Thanks for your time and feedback, Jack Coulter Miriam Ruiz wrote:
2008/4/15, Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org>:Le Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 10:03:17AM +0200, Miriam Ruiz a écrit :In general I try to avoid heated discussions with stubborn upstreams The 4th point is simply totally stupid and useless Some upstreams are just plainly stupid It's simply too childish.Hello Miriam,Hi :)while I do not really disagree with your conclusions, I was just wondering before you sent this email if the discussion got heated because the upstream read the thread on -mentors and got upset by persons calling his license "stupid".No, not in this case. It all seems to come from a previous discussion among some of them, some time ago [1]. I chose the words I used consciously, so I cannot excuse myself by saying it was the heat of the discussion, even more when I'm not personally involved at all in this package in any way. I'm sorry if it seemed that I was talking about this concrete upstream, I was just generalizing. In fact I was really thinking about another concrete person (upstream of a couple of games) when I used the word "stupid", who really got the nerves out of me some time ago. I wasn't talking about this concrete upstream or this concrete situation, it's not the first time I go through something like this.Since we know that email is a communication method that is very prone to misunderstandings, I think that we should try to play safe when discussion about third parties on a public mailing list.To avoid misunderstandings and just in case, I'll try to clarify this: I wasn't calling stupid to anyone in particular and was just generalizing. In fact, I wasn't trying to insult upstream for this game: I don't know them, never met them, never spoke to them, so I cannot think anything of them, good or bad. As it is obvious, but wanting to make it crystal clear: my words are my personal opinion and in no way should be interpreted as representing Debian or the Debian Games Team in any way, or any other group of people apart of myself. If upstream for that game reads this and gets angry, my words are my own responsibility and it's me who they have to blame for them, and no one else. I'll try to be more politically correct with my words next time, to avoid potential problems with some upstreams.I also wonder if IRC should be avoided for potentially difficult interactions with upstream. Anyway, thank you Jack for having tried.Greetings, Miry [1] http://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=957 "there have been quite a lot of nagging on the dev-team about the license. It started of back in the 0.3.x days, when the license was a bit more strict, and not to be considered "free". When they then changed the license to 0.4.x, some nagging just kept going on"