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Can you make the webapp and backend into a GPLv3-complying software to enable GameJam hosted by Free Software Foundation? #1265

Open Kreyren opened 2 years ago

Kreyren commented 2 years ago

I am trying to convince the Free Software Foundation Network to host a Game Jam on https://itch.io to encourage the development of Free/Libre and Open-Source games and i can already hear the community and their board of directors complaining about this.

Thanks for your consideration @leafo ^-^

Issues raised by FSF and the community that prevent the use of Itch.io for the game jam

leafo commented 2 years ago

I'm sorry but it's not a trivial thing. We deal with a lot of fraud, scammers, spam, etc. on a daily basis and for the safety of the platform and the users on it I don't feel comfortable making the entire platform open source. The game jam system is not something we can simply pull out and make open source since it's deeply connected to the models that power all other parts of the site relating to games, user accounts, administration, support, and more.

Making the entire platform open source is something I would like to do at some point but as there are so many other things on the list right now, and combined with the challenges listed above, it's not going to be a priority for possibly a very long time.

I have considered trying to break apart components of the platform into submodules, but it would introduce a new set of challenges: one being maintaining those components as projects people could independently run, and two the complexity it would add to the main development branch within itchio. An example of how I have tried to generalize a core component of the site into a separate open source project is how we handle all comments and message boards via https://github.com/leafo/lapis-community (and many other open source libraries that came to be because of the itchio site development).

Kreyren commented 2 years ago

I am not confident in convincing FSF to use itch.io for this as they have a strict policy on using anything that is not complying with GPLv3, but i proposed it to them https://freespeech.firedragonstudios.com/web/statuses/107524165957265556.

About WebApp

I understood that the backend and webapp (client) are not separated so i would suggest the first course of action to separate them into an invidual components assuming that other clients such as https://github.com/itchio/itch are already open-source so there shouldn't be any conflicts there.

Assuming that you currently don't have the resources to work on this -> Could you make this process contributable? e.g. can we submit a 3rd party webapp to replace the current?

About backend

Due to the multiple (4 known) clients that are already present, did you consider making the backend federated?

I think that it would solve the presented issues as open-sourcing would mean that anyone can deploy their own version of itch.io and this way they would be providing resources to the network to handle more users and address the moderation as each instance admin would be handling their users according to the specification to be allowed in the federated network.

Possibly implementing an activityHub for itch to be part of fediverse to handle the content on game pages e.g. how peertube is doing it?

JacobKfromIRC commented 1 year ago

Hello, I was planning on contacting support to ask this but I thought it might be better to ask here: What is the license of the source-available JavaScript served by itch.io currently? I am planning on (eventually) making a Haketilo package for itch.io, which will make it easy for people who want to avoid nonfree software to download (and eventually buy) games. I have already written a 33-line script that allows downloading non-pay-what-you-want games (i.e. only games that don't even ask for money), and I used game.js for reference (For some reason I thought I already knew itch.io's JavaScript was free software but I think I was thinking of something else.).

Since there is no license header on game.js, do I need to worry about copyright infringement when sharing the software that I wrote (based on game.js)? How can I find the licensing information of game.js and the other JavaScript on itch.io?

I think this is relevant to this issue because the source code of most of the browser app already comes with the served software (with exceptions for some libraries), so if they are free-licensed then they might make developing a fully free software client much easier. A hard part could be replacing proprietary libraries like Stripe and reCAPTCHA, but I have already written a program to pay with Stripe on another website and Wojtek Kosior has written a libre reCAPTCHA client, so with a bit of work I think a fully free client is very achievable, even without changing the back-end at all.