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skmp / reicast-emulator

Reicast was a multiplatform Sega Dreamcast emulator
https://reicast.emudev.org
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1.1k stars 345 forks source link

Licensing violation, GPL, future plans & related discussion #455

Closed skmp closed 4 years ago

skmp commented 10 years ago

Mhrf, I hoped not having to deal with this for a little bit longer, but I guess shit happens (#452)

I was already thinking of changing/discussing the license stuff for a while, I guess the time has come.

Some legalese

In order for me to take action against this (and other violations) I need to be the main copyright owner. Copyright violations can't be pursued by 3rd parties.

Current reicast copyright status

Here's the current copyright structure of reicast

As nillware owns a very large part of the project, I can take legal action via this route, under Greek Law. If any of you want to you can also take legal action as your copyrights might also be violated (if your code was included in the happy chick build). The fact that the violation was definitely in "bad faith" and couldn't happen "accidentally" make this a fairly clear case for the US judicial system.

Any copyright owner can also request a take-down under the DMCA system.

As always, it's probably best to contact the author directly and take lega/dmca action only if such actions don't resolve this issue. We should do this once we decide on how we'll move forward.

Future plans

Now, with that said, I'd really like to clean up the copyright status, and license reicast under a different license.

Why ?

I want reicast to be the best dreamcast emulator, available on every possible platform, with the source public, and at no cost of the end users. I'd also love seeing it integrated into every Chinese device that comes with build in emulators, etc.

I'm not really interested on making any money off it, apart from getting paid a reasonable amount of money for my time spent developing. I don't mind if its low paying compared to my typical contracts, but the project has to be sustainable. Everyone needs to become self-sustaining adult eventually...

I'd really like that every regular/"important" contributor to get paid a reasonable amount of money for their work. Again, this might not be market-rate $$$$, but ideology comes at a price. Open source runs way too much into donated time, and that's not sustainable, or fair, imo.

Proposed license

Something BSD/apache/MIT based, with an extra clause requiring the inclusion of a logo/text, which is visible for some time (like, 5 seconds) during emulator bootup. The logo/text will be like "[icon] Powered by reicast / reicast.com"

The code can also be licensed under GPL, but in that case integrators have to release their entire app's source code, and some features (like moga integration) might not be avaiable.

For special cases, like companies that want to license under even more permissive terms, they'll have to negotiate a different license for a price. There will be a public list of all licensees.

Funding

We've been thinking from the beginning to start a indie go go campain as a main drive to raise funding for a year or two. That's still the main idea, scheduled for somewhere in july. The goal is $100K for a year of development.

There could be a donation-ware version on the app store as well, or, preferably an in app purchase.

A third way is licensing money from interested 3rd parties.

I wound't want to have "payware" only features, as that's not really a donation.

How ?

There are a couple of typical ways on how to move forward with this.

What other typically projects do is require contributors to transfer the copyright to the company that "takes care" of the project. While this might be a fair enough route, I'd like for everyone to keep their copyright (its your code!).

A solution I like more is for contributors to release their work under a permissive license (BSD/Apache/MIT/whatever). This way it can be integrated without issues, and everyone gets to keep their copyright. The only exception to this is that i'd like nillware to keep the "majority" of the copyright, as this might be important in fighting violations .

in Short, this means that all contributors would have to re-license their work under a BSD, or transfer copyright to nillware. If we go that way, i'll email everyone involved to get permission. Afaik an email giving permission is legally binding so this is rather simple.

We'll have to rewrite the parts that we can't get permission for though. This is a fairly minor issue as most of that code already requires a rewrite anyway.

Your feedback

I know this is an a big wall of text, and i'd really like everyone involved to read it and write their opinions. If you don't want to publicly write something, you can use the dev forums, or email me directly at skmp@nillware.com - though I believe that all discussion should be public

Thanks

... for making this such an awesome project :)

--- Want to back this issue? **[Post a bounty on it!](https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1948642-licensing-violation-gpl-future-plans-related-discussion?utm_campaign=plugin&utm_content=tracker%2F500311&utm_medium=issues&utm_source=github)** We accept bounties via [Bountysource](https://www.bountysource.com/?utm_campaign=plugin&utm_content=tracker%2F500311&utm_medium=issues&utm_source=github).
skmp commented 10 years ago

@angelXwind, @bwRavencl, @hooby3dfx, @lioncash, @LoungeKatt, @MrPsyMan, @neko68k, @ptitSeb - pinging ya all, I want your feedback on this. I'll also send emails.

MrPsyMan commented 10 years ago

About the money part, I know that it doesn't sound good to many people, it doesn't sound good to me either, but we've hit countless walls due to money oriented limitations.

For starters we've originally been developing on basic no-name hardware that was pretty weak, unreliable and had minimal support cause we couldn't afford "better".

When we got our hands into "better" devices it was either because someone was kind enough to donate one to us (ie: nvidia, the ouya and gcw guys) or because we found a cheap 2nd hand device (usually partially defective, like drk's current phone that has a huge crack on the back).

Contributors so far were a huge help. We have some serious living issues here (in a national level) and we had to push the project on the back seat in order to secure some income to live. If it wasn't for our current contributors, I doubt that we would be able to push even more than one revision out. And now, mostly thanks to them, we are on the 6th revision, with the 7th just around the corner.

We need the voices of the rest contributors in order to decide what to do with those matters, so if you have something to suggest, please do so. It doesn't matter if you contributed a line of code or a thousand, if your contributed even a bit, then you have a saying on this.

skmp commented 10 years ago

updated [Current reicast copyright status] for 3rd party libraries

Getting fairly paid for doing decent work that others can enjoy for free sounds pretty good to me.

And oh, I actually paid for the ouya via nillware ;)

skmp commented 10 years ago

Updated [Taking actions on violations] with friendly contact amendment

AbandonedCart commented 10 years ago

I filed a report with Play for infringement, both for use of another app and the illegal publishing of the BIOS.

You gotta do what you gotta do, just make sure to forward me and @angelXwind some sort of written consent for hosting.

shuffle2 commented 10 years ago

@skmp may re-license anything I've contributed to nulldc/reicast however he likes.

lioncash commented 10 years ago

Likewise – you (@skmp) can re-license anything I've contributed however you want.

MrPsyMan commented 10 years ago

If @skmp re-licenses anything I've contributed to reicast, then he has my permission to do so, as a result however, I gain the right to pay him a visit and poke him in the eye whenever I feel like doing so.

akemin-dayo commented 10 years ago

Just like the last few comments here, @skmp has the permission to re-license anything I've contributed to reicast.

neko68k commented 10 years ago

@skmp has permission to relicense anything I've contributed to reicast

hooby3dfx commented 10 years ago

I'm going to follow suit. Any contributions of mine thus far are all yours. On May 7, 2014 6:33 AM, "Shaun Thompson" notifications@github.com wrote:

@skmp https://github.com/skmp has permission to relicense anything I've contributed to reicast

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator/issues/455#issuecomment-42411785 .

AbandonedCart commented 10 years ago

Anyone else notice the number of forks jumped shortly after this post?

skmp commented 10 years ago

Lol...

Luca1991 commented 10 years ago

@skmp have my permission to relicense the CloudVmu patch, and all my future contributions!

meveric commented 9 years ago

@skmp has my permission to relicense my contribution to reicast.

ptitSeb commented 9 years ago

@skmp has my permission to relicense my contribution to reicast

Holzhaus commented 9 years ago

@skmp has my permission to relicense my contributions to reicast. Although I hope reicast sticks with the GPL (possibly dual-licensed).

randomstuff commented 9 years ago

@skmp: You have my permission to relicense all the code I'm contributing here on MIT, BSD and/or Apache license.

fuel-pcbox commented 8 years ago

If I ever contribute code to this project (which by the way, sounds quite enticing), I'd just like you to know that I'll gladly transfer all copyright to nillware, as I don't give a crap about what happens to my code.

gizmo98 commented 8 years ago

@skmp You have my permission to relicense all the code I'm contributing here.

luserx0 commented 6 years ago

@skmp I parsed this text into the CONTRIBUTING doc I'm creating for the docs PR. This issue can be closed. If you want to change our license as you've mentioned, open a new ticket (and make a damn blogpost <3)

PS: I like WTFPL

AbandonedCart commented 6 years ago

Actually, changing to a license like that after many of the contributors signed over their code in a CLA is exploiting the CLA. The current license ensures their code is only reused in the context of reicast without special permission, it is not packaged in proprietary programs, and that there is proper reference given for use of the code. You more or less throw all of that out and claim that what HappyChic was doing, which sparked this entire issue, was fully acceptable. It is bad enough that many people are apprehensive about signing a CLA, but now you would offer up permission to use the code in any context with no obligation to publish it. It completely contradicts years of stating quite the opposite, including statements like

If you are interested into further porting/adapting/whatever, please don't fork off. I hate that. Really.

This is, of course, assuming WTFPL was a serious suggestion.

skmp commented 4 years ago

1788 switched the codebase to BSD3. This seems to be the best long term solution. Hopefully we won't have to backtrack to something more aggresive (see #1648 for context)