How To Distinguish "freebeer Games" And "freespeach Gam

[Gnuku]

I feel a big problem in the GP2X archiver site. I cannot see the type of licence in all the games I download in the freeware game section. For the games as for softwares, knowing the type of licence is important because licences basically tel the rights (liberties) of the gamers and other game builders when they want to play or use the source codes and the music for their own project. It is a basic right to have an easy access to the licence as it is for food where you want to know if it is GMO free, Organic labels, Fairtrade Licences, health foundation sponsored .... and to know the organisation that provided the licence, because Some are independant, others not. some licences provide 100% organic others 95 or 90%, some fairtrade labels certify the consumer that the company give a high percentage of the price to the farmers and insure its independance as a landholder, others give a smaller percentage of the price work and do not certify if the farmer is a dependant employee or hold is own land etc...

For games (as for food, DVD, music, comics and all licences goods) that's the same thing. for games licences restrict more or less 4 liberties on the source code, music, picture of the game (4 liberties: read, share, modify and share modifications). If downloaders like me are sensitive to the type of licence for a pragmatic or a philosophical point of views, what can I do? Currently you have to unzip the file and check the type of licence when there is one. However In many games of the freeware archive, you cannot see any or hardly any licence. Even for some of the most popular games. A simple exemple is the very good game with touchscreen capacities named Animatch v1.2 (Futur ultra popular hit of the GP2X, thank you aka ruckage). However, there is no licence in the zip file. But also no licence in the site of "aka ruckage". No licence specification for the music of the game. It is only written free of charge game in the aka's site. Well, I don't know what free of charge meens in term of my right. I only suspect that the game is free as in"free beer" and not free as "free speech" or opensource/openart. Have i to send an email to the programer, the musician ... everytime I want to know the licence? Building myself the list of all games and finding the licence in the bazar of compressed file? Hey mates, this is internet Era! We all know we can inform easilly downloaders while respecting and not perturbing so much the game builder and the surfers in file archiver.

So what can we do to make everybody happy

- The first way is to build two folders that clearly separate true free games (under licences such as GPL or equivalent) and others that have one of the four restrictions on the source code and music (read, share, modify, share the modifications). The problem is that you've got a gradient of licences that give more or less of those 4 freedom. A simple dichotomy is thus not very pleasant for game builders who don't want to be cathegorized in any of those two extreme types of licences.
- Another more flexible way would be to add in the freeware game folder, 1 to 3 new criterion to rank games by type of licence in the file archiver. for one game we would have the information

Screenshot / Name / Date / Downloads / Comment / Size

and 1-3 of those new criterion:

Licence game ////// Licence pictures and music ///// Licence documents


I give exemples of licences that exists for the 3 new criterion (exemples are ranked with more and more restrictions on the 4 liberties)

for Licence of the source code of the Game: GPL v3 > v2, .... >MIT > .....> free of charge > copyrigh
Licence for pictures, movies and music: CC > CC-by > CC-by-nd > CC-by-nd-sa > ....> free of charge > copyrigh
Licence for documents: CC, = GFDL > free of charge > copyright......

Then a simple way would be to ask the builder of the game to simply write the type of licence when he uploads the game in the file archiver. We could thus rank the licences by alphabetic order. adding maybe a filter for the research would also help to find the game of our dream restricted by our choice of licence we are looking for. Anyway the choice, The site GP2X archiver should provide at least a link to the sites of the licences (or wikipedia) to inform the community about the licence.

many website where one can download software do that. That's very usefull and everybody is happy: the one that don't care about the licence and just want to play games, and the others that care about licence for pragmatic or philosophical point of views.

What do you think?


Son Gnuku - The power of freedom

 

[satanic virus]

Someone makes a game for free & you write all this crap over licences??!!!

Learn about GPL & also respect the individual authors right to distribute software how they wish.

Oh, & welcome to the community but I sense a troll already ..... .... ... .. .

 

[Gnuku]

Someone makes a game for free & you write all this crap over licences??!!!

Learn about GPL & also respect the individual authors right to distribute software how they wish.

Oh, & welcome to the community but I sense a troll already ..... .... ... .. .

You did not understand my topic.

I don't propose deleting non GPL games or imped programers to develop under the licence they want.
The one that want to publish the game in a particular licence... that's his own buisness. He is free.
I propose a criteria by licence type to respect everybody. and to help people to select what they think it is the best.
If some people think the issue is not important, well this is their choice and I respect it.But some would be happy switch toward copyleft games (free music, free code or part of the code). without ambiguity everybody would be happy .

It is like a basic product you eat. You want to know if it is GMO free or not (GMO free at 95% or at 100%), if it is fairtrade produce or not (all the licence of fairtrade are not very fair you know). If it is cholesterol free or not, with produce that can induce cancer .... These labels have social, health and ecological consequences for everybody. The one that doesn't want to buy organic, fairtrade is not to be bashed, but he has to know the consequences. The more you buy bad produces, the more you kill good farmers, good manucturers ... But true at the end It will be the choice of the game builder and the downloader. And I respect that. But I do not accept lack of important information.
I only want to remove ambiguity when you download a game. And contribute like others to help downloader to be aware of the issues under games they download and the consequences about their choice on the community.

Anyway the GP2X archive is not a place for only game builders or only gamers. It is an interface between game builders and gamers. without games -> no gamers. but the opposite is true.

PS: And for my knowledge on GPL licence. You should turn your tongue 77 times before speaking. I know perfectly what is GPL. I don't need to be Richard Stallman or Ian Murdock to know the consequences of one licence, as I contribute to build packages for the scientific software R-cran under GPL . I know perfectly the consequences of each type of licence on the scientific community. the dependances. the negative and positive effects. who used ambiguity of licences to transform programs into proprietary ones. Ther is not only Microsoft that do that.

 

[Alex.]

QUOTE
to help downloader to be aware of the issues under games they download and the consequences about their choice on the community

What does this mean? You said the archive is a place for developers and gamers, but to gamers a freeware game is a free game, no matter if it is closed source or open sourced. There are no additional implications there, though your first post seemed to suggest that downloading a free non-GPLed game is encouraging a 'wrong' cause.

I find your choice to only play GPLed freeware games a bit narrow, you're missing out on a lot of good stuff. How does knowing whether you can re-use a particular game's graphics, code, or sound in your own projects affect the enjoyment you get from playing that game?

 

[satanic virus]

Happy ranting, topic was understood very well!

I won't be feeding thee anymore apart from to say this is an open source community - we are not seeking unecessary restrictions or subjective limitations/ descriptions on our software.

Delighted to know you understand the consequences of 'each type of license on the scientific community'

 

[Exophase]

Mm, stopped over here from the Church of Stallman...

It wouldn't hurt to have the license information there, but there's certainly no good argument for why it must be.

If it doesn't include the GPL license files then it isn't GPL. What more do you need to know? If it offends you just delete it afterwards. Wanting to not help its "popularity" by not downloading it is incredibly petty. No one's going to steal the game if the source isn't available to begin with, but if that happens it's the author's problem, not yours.

And saying that a game that's only "free as in beer" is only a treasure to the author is disgusting.

GPL is a good option for various reasons, but people such as yourself with this kind of religious attitude towards it and the insidious drive to demand it and convert all software to it are really just hurting things. License should be a personal philosophy about how you want to do your work, not something you demand from others.

 

[Gnuku]

Mm, stopped over here from the Church of Stallman...

It wouldn't hurt to have the license information there, but there's certainly no good argument for why it must be.

If it doesn't include the GPL license files then it isn't GPL. What more do you need to know? If it offends you just delete it afterwards. Wanting to not help its "popularity" by not downloading it is incredibly petty. No one's going to steal the game if the source isn't available to begin with, but if that happens it's the author's problem, not yours.

And saying that a game that's only "free as in beer" is only a treasure to the author is disgusting.

GPL is a good option for various reasons, but people such as yourself with this kind of religious attitude towards it and the insidious drive to demand it and convert all software to it are really just hurting things. License should be a personal philosophy about how you want to do your work, not something you demand from others.

OKOK Mate .... Break

I promote true free software. Yes. But I respect the choice of the programmer.
So don't be nervous. And I don't propose to relicence the non-gpl games. 1 I cannot legally and 2 That's not my philosophy. But giving tools for people like me and others to choose a game according to licence type and asking programers to fill the detail of their licence when they upload the game in the databas is not an insulte to programers and gamers. we are on internet. we can do a lot of things on a webpage and on data base manipulation. Providing this information is I think important. Now if nobody wants that information.
No worries. I will wait for Pandorra and the synaptic-like system of packages for the Angstrom distro to filter the games I will download.

Finally the sentence 'free beer' and 'free speech' is frequently used and is not pejorative in my speech.

it is only to avoid ambiguity of english language. In my native language (french) , there is no ambiguity beween free (freedom = "libre" in french) and free for you pay nothing = "gratuit" in french)
we use "Gratuiciel" (for free software you don't pay) and "logiciel libre" (for freedom software).
Now if I offended people I will rewrite latter the paper to avoid all the ambiguities.

cheers mates

.

 

[Gnuku]

Happy ranting, topic was understood very well!

I won't be feeding thee anymore apart from to say this is an open source community - we are not seeking unecessary restrictions or subjective limitations/ descriptions on our software.

Delighted to know you understand the consequences of 'each type of license on the scientific community'

Remember,

Some guys of the community made pressure on Game Park Holding in 2006 to provide the code of the firmware. because they said that it was GPL, And they did not want to accept the GPL rule. It was a long fight and the pressure from the community finally succeeded.
so because that opensource sub-community exists, you can enjoy updates of the firmware from the community. So respecting restrictions is a first thing.

After be ambiguous on the restrictions is a second thing. But also freeware games is an ambiguous name for the Archive. And some people like me believed that games were copylefted. That's what I critisize. In my language no ambiguity.

Finally, You claimed that the community doesn't want restrictions. That's your right to think that. But a community is what we build. not what you think it is. I propose new information on the restrictions of the game. that's my right too as a member of the community. that's democracy. If what I propose is finally adopted. well, It will be part of the rule of the community. if not no worries. that's life.

 

[Chip]

Any author who wants to include licensing notes (or has to, depending on license) is free to do so, as they are free to mention the licensing in the program description on the archive. They are also free not to. It should be enough that somebody took the time to create a program and offer it free of charge. To make demands about exactly how they offer their free software is frankly rude.

Your recollection of the GP2X firmware issue is also pretty firmly divorced from reality. The firmware release was delayed because a 3rd party developer had been hired to make the media player, and that code could not be released. So there was a delay while the GPL code was sorted out from the proprietary code. GPH had every intention of releasing the firmware code, and did as soon as they were able.

 

[Gnuku]

Any author who wants to include licensing notes (or has to, depending on license) is free to do so, as they are free to mention the licensing in the program description on the archive. They are also free not to. It should be enough that somebody took the time to create a program and offer it free of charge. To make demands about exactly how they offer their free software is frankly rude.

Your recollection of the GP2X firmware issue is also pretty firmly divorced from reality. The firmware release was delayed because a 3rd party developer had been hired to make the media player, and that code could not be released. So there was a delay while the GPL code was sorted out from the proprietary code. GPH had every intention of releasing the firmware code, and did as soon as they were able.

Thank you for being the first to be politewith me

For GP Holding: I red that, and GP holding was on the list of the gpl red list. but maybe by mistake. I did knew your story. thank you for you precision.
For being rude or not to ask what the game is? I don't think it is rude. GP2X was a GPL project. so it is normal that people that are sensitive to GPL licences and that bought the console for that ask at least to provide a minimum of precision on the games. All the software do that and people have to accept the conditions of the software. DVD, music cd, normal games also. So I don't know why the game builders for GP2X would escape to that. It is also a way to protect either the programer (if it is copyrighted) or all the community. That's a basic right to know what you use. I bought a GP2X for that and because i thought the freeware game folder of the GP2X archive website provided true free games. If I knew that before, maybe I would not buy the console as I am not really wealthy. GP2X is a good console. But PSP and DS are better for technological and ergonomic point of view. and games are better, they can also emulate games for free (beer) like GP2X if you know how to flash it. That's easy. Programers develop also games for free to be used on those consoles. Their community are also big, and probably bigger thatn the GP2X community. The only advantage of GP2X is the linux based system and GPL. What else?


Wait for you reply

Gnuku

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, I couid add an optional field to the archive where a dev can specify a license... but it should stay optional and nothing more fancy. It's up to the dev whether he wants to include a license or just release it for free.
When I release something, I just say "It's free! Do whatever you want with it!" as (besides of the GPL), I have no clue about all those licenses around... and I guess there are more devs like that.

 

[carlgeorge]

Perhaps a happy compromise would be from some check-boxes for developers to pick a license type when they upload their programs. That way the file archive could be tweaked to indicate a type of license. Then Gnuku and like-minded members could easily identify the license before downloading? Just a thought.

 

[Orkie]

... No restrictions means GPL ...

So.. you don't actually know what the GPL is.

 

[PokeParadox]

Well, I couid add an optional field to the archive where a dev can specify a license... but it should stay optional and nothing more fancy. It's up to the dev whether he wants to include a license or just release it for free.
When I release something, I just say "It's free! Do whatever you want with it!" as (besides of the GPL), I have no clue about all those licenses around... and I guess there are more devs like that.

Yeah... that's the problem... there are so many licenses and each wither there own restrictions, etc.
It ends up easier just to say "PS please don't rip me off" at the end of a readme.

Basically I want my source to be out there so people can look at it and learn and possibly see some horrendous code they should avoid replicating :lol:. I don't want people to just change one line and say they spent 4 years developing an engine...
To be perfectly honest I have no clue over licensing, there should be a site with a multiple choice form, they asks you clear concise questions and then says "LGPL is the right license for you... or whatever."

 

[Parkydr]

The license only practically affects the source code in the archive which should have a license file.

As there is no payment for downloading the games or even a ranking system, there is no way of indicating your support for a particular game anyway.

 

[Gnuku]

The license only practically affects the source code in the archive which should have a license file.

As there is no payment for downloading the games or even a ranking system, there is no way of indicating your support for a particular game anyway.

should have but in practice not.
not affect only the code as a game is not only composed of algorithms but also of music, pictures, video and text files.
that's the reason why I ask to build an easy ranking system based on the type of licence.
game builders would be required to write the name of the licence when they upload the game in the file archiver.

 

[Exophase]

The license only practically affects the source code in the archive which should have a license file.

As there is no payment for downloading the games or even a ranking system, there is no way of indicating your support for a particular game anyway.

that's the reason why I ask a ranking system based on the type of licence


Let me try an argument of utility:

This shouldn't be a mandatory change because the only person who wants it is you.

 

[Gnuku]

The license only practically affects the source code in the archive which should have a license file.

As there is no payment for downloading the games or even a ranking system, there is no way of indicating your support for a particular game anyway.

that's the reason why I ask a ranking system based on the type of licence


Let me try an argument of utility:

This shouldn't be a mandatory change because the only person who wants it is you.


hey God who knows what all people think and want in this community ,tell me

how you explain popularity of sites like www.tucows.com/ that allow to select and download a software based on the type of licence.
How you explain popularity of sites like magnatune, jamendo that provide music with concerns on the type of licence and restrictions to fit to artists and listeners interests.
How you explain popularity of the creative commons creations and the great variety of licences the the organisation provides to best fit interests of the creators and consumers.
how you explain that more and more politics and departments in the world ask this question to select the park of OS and software.

But Games (made with codes, music, pictures, texts (dialogues, stories)) would be the only world that should not be concerned by that issue, simply because you God of nothing don't find any personal interest and has decided that is not useful for your liliputian creation.
citizen-members propose and the community decides in a democratic community. not gods or kings. they were killed in 1789. if you, old man of the ancien Era, don't like democratic system, take a lift and come back to your world and create a theocracy where you will only accept mini-you.

son Gnuku - the power of freedom

 

[Gnuku]

Well, I couid add an optional field to the archive where a dev can specify a license... but it should stay optional and nothing more fancy. It's up to the dev whether he wants to include a license or just release it for free.
When I release something, I just say "It's free! Do whatever you want with it!" as (besides of the GPL), I have no clue about all those licenses around... and I guess there are more devs like that.

OhOh Evil Dragon himself.

thank you for your proposal.

but simple question. what I have to understand your sentence "It's free! Do whatever you want with it! as (besides of the GPL)" is it a licence or not? because licence GPL put some restrictions = no restrictions on four core liberties. that's different than a text quoting it's free do what you want. But you know better than me.

So is it a licence or not. If you don't put a licence on your games. how can you avoid that companies licence your work and make money on your sweat. If i want to licence and earn money on the games you cited ("I guess there are more devs like that") I can? ouhouh, I feel I will be rich pretty soon. LOL I will never do that. But If you cannot avoid that, it is not moral to promote that type of behaviour in the community. you or others could one day licence all the games and earn money on the sweat of the programers. hopefully the gnu/linux Angstrom codes are licenced.

don't see any agressivity in my sentences. I only want to better understand your point of view using the limits of the arguments.

Thank you again for your proposal. Sounds good. and I would be happy to have at least that hierchical structure to select a game.

... No restrictions means GPL ...

So.. you don't actually know what the GPL is.



No restrictions with the source code ... on the 4 core liberties : reading, sharing, modifying, sharing the modifications

maybe it was no clear enough in my old text. but it is clear in my mind. now the new text is better on that point

 

[Exophase]

The license only practically affects the source code in the archive which should have a license file.

As there is no payment for downloading the games or even a ranking system, there is no way of indicating your support for a particular game anyway.

that's the reason why I ask a ranking system based on the type of licence


Let me try an argument of utility:

This shouldn't be a mandatory change because the only person who wants it is you.


hey God who knows what all people think and want in this community ,tell me

how you explain popularity of sites like www.tucows.com/ that allow to select and download a software based on the type of licence.
How you explain popularity of sites like magnatune, jamendo that provide music with concerns on the type of licence and restrictions to fit to artists and listeners interests.
How you explain popularity of the creative commons creations and the great variety of licences the the organisation provides to best fit interests of the creators and consumers.
how you explain that more and more politics and departments in the world ask this question to select the park of OS and software.

But Games (made with codes, music, pictures, texts (dialogues, stories)) would be the only world that should not be concerned by that issue, simply because you God of nothing don't find any personal interest and has decided that is not useful for your liliputian creation.
citizen-members propose and the community decides in a democratic community. not gods or kings. they were killed in 1789. if you, old man of the ancien Era, don't like democratic system, take a lift and come back to your world and create a theocracy where you will only accept mini-you.

son Gnuku - the power of freedom


How do you explain that you're the only person here getting all worked up over this and that no one is agreeing with you? Actually, the one missing out on "democratic process" appears to be you.

This isn't one of those sites you mentioned, no one cares.

Get off your high horse. You couldn't be more stuck up if you tried.