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Trilarion / opensourcegames

Technical infos of open source games.
https://trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Add Cube #370

Closed CruzR closed 2 years ago

CruzR commented 2 years ago

Adds Cube, the game that spawned the Cube engine family.

I could not locate a repository, but the SF project contains several source snapshots, so it should be possible to reconstruct at least some coarse history.

Assets are not free-as-in-freedom but are free-as-in-beer, so neither the "open" nor the "commercial" tag seems to fit. Maybe a new category is needed there?

Trilarion commented 2 years ago

Thank you for an excellent formatted entry. I had the free-as-in-beer case already once I think. Don't remember though what I did.

However, the crucial thing is not the price but the license of the content. If it can be used for free with the game, it's open. But maybe open should be renamed to free or gratis. After all the license of the content is specified additionally.

CruzR commented 2 years ago

AssaultCube is in a similar situation as Cube is, the content is gratis, but it can't really be re-used in a truly libre game. In OSGL, it currently simply doesn't have a content license specified, so I kept it the same for Cube. Maybe "gratis" would be a better tag than "open", as I associate the latter more with something where the content also fulfills the Open Source Definition.

I'm going to open more pull requests for other games from the Cube engine family in the coming days, some of which also have content that is gratis, but not libre. Should I just leave them untagged until you've decided how you want to tag these kinds of games?

Trilarion commented 2 years ago

It would be good to tag them if you can. We just need to decide on an appropriate tagging convention.

What exactly is the content license of Cube games? How are they gratis but not free?

CruzR commented 2 years ago

From the readme.txt in Cube's source archive:

The license covers the source code found in the "src" directory of this archive, the included enet network library which cube uses is covered by an MIT-style license, which is however compatible with the above license for all practical purposes.

Game media included in the cube game (maps, textures, sounds, models etc.) are not covered by this license, and may have individual copyrights and distribution restrictions (see individual readmes).

Looking through the various assets, some don't specify a license at all (and thus cannot be redistributed), few to none are under a well-defined license like CC-something-or-other, and most define ad-hoc licensing conditions. Of these ad-hoc licenses, some are compatible with an "open" tag, e.g.:

Feel free to use the model in whatever you like, commercial whatever, all I ask is for you to credit me for creating the model if possible, and maybe show me some screenshots, I love to see my models in your projects!!!!!! :)

If you use any of these Tech1 shader/textures I kindly ask YOU to give me credit for my work within your README file or TEXT file distributed with your map/mod.

Others aren't:

This model is not to be distributed as part of any commercial product.

The song is copyrighted (c) 2004 Marc A. Pullen, and may only be redistributed with this zip file for use in the Cube engine.

You're free to distribute this map as you wish as long as: you make no profit, and leave the files intact. However, Internet distribution is to be only through web sites of my choosing as long as one exists.

Trilarion commented 2 years ago

It's mixed licenses then, some more open others less. The last part "Internet distribution is to be only through web sites of my choosing as long as one exists." is especially critical. Maybe one should aim at creating a fully open version of Cube including only open content.