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dethrace-labs / dethrace

Reverse engineering the 1997 game "Carmageddon"
https://twitter.com/dethrace_labs
GNU General Public License v3.0
670 stars 38 forks source link

Please fix legal section/license #62

Open logan2611 opened 2 years ago

logan2611 commented 2 years ago

The legal section of the README does not match up with the LICENSE file present in the repository.

Additionally, in the README it states that this repository is pubic domain, however you attempt to put a restriction on its use (non commercial only), despite the fact that public domain means that you waive any right to do such a thing. Furthermore, the LICENSE file is GPL, which also prohibits completely restricting commercial usage.

jeff-1amstudios commented 2 years ago

Lol, yeah, thanks - I need to sort that out. Do you have an impression for what license other similar projects are using?

neuromancer commented 2 years ago

I think this is a reasonable example to follow: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX#legal

OmniBlade commented 2 years ago

@neuromancer That is a terrible example to follow as it give contradictory directives. If its in the public domain then it can't be restricted to only working with the original game data and it can't be restricted to none commercial use because the whole point of public domain is that there are no restrictions on use.

Personally I'd favour the GPL or some other copy left license that requires source to modifications to be shared after experiences in other communities where future maintainers have built on others work and shut the rest of the community out of future development with licences that didn't require that.

neuromancer commented 2 years ago

The reason behind suggesting that was just simply because it is one of the oldest projects to directly use decompiled code that it is still alive.

OmniBlade commented 2 years ago

Off the top of my head both OpenDUNE and OpenRCT2 are considerably older and are GPL licensed, but yeah I get your reasoning for considering that project.

The problem is that their licensing standpoint is at least in my opinion contradictory and as a result the restrictions they claim to want to enforce won't be enforceable. Better to just to use an proper existing license that covers what you want it to.

logan2611 commented 2 years ago

As mentioned, the devilutionX repo states that it is public domain, but it too tries to restrict commercial usage. Perhaps I should bring that up there too. On their repository though their LICENSE file is at least sort of consistent with the README being that both state that the repo is public domain.

A good resources to see a TL;DR on various licenses is https://tldrlegal.com (not legal advice) From my experience, the licenses I see the most are:

jeff-1amstudios commented 2 years ago

The LICENSE we currently have is GPL3. Some of the wording in the readme comes from the Devilution readme, and I wanted to disallow any commercial use (which of course isn't in line with GPL 3). Maybe I'll just remove the extra wording from the readme for now