Also, send me your recipe for LSD.

Wont do that over the internets, but I have a story to share. When I was kid, my little dearly departed creole granny from Louisiana would visit us a few times a year. It was a tradition in her family to make their own root beer distilled into a concentrated form from sassafras roots. She would bring several bottles of this concoction up for me, and let me tell you buddy, that stuff would fuck you up good and hard. You were suppose to mix the stuff with tonic water or seltzer to dilute it, but I never did. Straight, no chaser! You may already know what substance this sort of root beer shares a similar chemical composition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdma 

 

These are some amazing GPL sound effects:
http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4476 

There are some very good sounds there.

I knew of this pack, it seems to have gotten bigger though. :)

GPL for sounds is a bit strange, since there's no source. CC would make more sense. 

GPL for content still makes sense; if you create a derivative texture/sound/etc, then your derivative texture/sound/etc must also be free for people to use. 

GPL for sounds is a bit strange, since there's no source.

The GPL defines the "source" to be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it." By this definition, sound effects can well be their own source if in .wav format. For lossy formats like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, source would probably be a lossless version. 

Practically, you run into trouble as soon as you mix GPL sounds with anything under a different license (because the result would be considered a derivative work by the GPL, and the viral aspect would kick in). The other license might not allow the work to be relicensed under GPL, in which case you have to bin the whole work.

The result is that GPL only really works with GPL, ie within the context of the GNU project. It's good for the GNU project, but bad for progress.

The GPL doesn't play nice with others, which is just as bad as commercial licenses not playing nice with others and hence puts the whole GNU mythology ad absurdum. 

Yes, but this stuff is made for games and open-source games use the GPL. So this is the best way as no license mixing is involved. Isn't that basically what you are saying too? 

but not all open source games use the GPL. That's the bit where the problems start.

What you are saying is true only if you assume the whole environment is GPL.

Quake, for example, is different. Most mods don't use the GPL. The sounds don't use the GPL, nor do the models, skins or textures.

What I'm saying is that if you make stuff, and you want your stuff be universally usable, the GPL is not the best way to go. Public Domain is the best way to go.

GPL is the best way to go if you want your stuff to only be used in a GPL environment (ie, restrict it).

Of course there are two sides to this medal. You just pointed out the other one. 

I acknowledge that I have been very GPL zealous in the past. But I got older and more experienced :)

As an example:

(...) That, however, doesn�t change the fact that I find a position which actively tries to discourage proprietary software to be wrong, both from a practical and MORAL standpoint (hey, if Stallman can use the language of morality, so can I). I posed the following scenario in the Talkbacks to my previous blog. Say a borough or neighborhood decides they want to build a park. Since parks involve both allocations of land and resources to buy park equipment, they aren�t cheap, so the community must decide how to build something that suits everyone in the neighborhood.

Now, assume there is a group in that neighborhood who is vegetarian. Further, this group isn�t just vegetarian, but has a strong dislike for those who aren�t vegetarian. Therefore, they insist that no one be allowed to eat meat while in the park (they managed to get those who insisted that no one who eats meat anywhere, in the park or otherwise, to back down). If the neighborhood doesn�t agree to these terms, they will go off and build a park that is exclusively vegetarian, cost inefficiencies and wasted space be damned.

They have a right to do that, as it is their money they will spend on the park. Why, however, does the fact that others eat meat affect the decision not to eat meat among vegetarians? Further, however many ways you slice it, an exclusivity stance is wasteful of human effort, as now the neighborhood will have two parks. (...)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1707 

I thought you meant a typical (more restricting) CC license. I am all pro-"full-freedom" too. 

especially when it comes to assets(?) like sounds, textures, code snippets etc. 

Turns out I was too naive about creative commons licenses, too. Let's see:

CC Attribution license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").

CC Attribution-ShareAlike License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Japan).

Spot the difference. The part in bold is the problem. 

the bold part is what makes it a "share-alike" license. CC has a lot of licenses, their goal is to provide content creators with choices about how to license their work. I'm not suprised that some of them are similar to the GPL.

I think the real grey area for these sorts of licenses is whether a larger work, made by assembling small pieces, is also bound by the terms of the small pieces.

i.e. if a .map is released under GPL, does and some mod uses it, does the entire mod have to be GPL, or do they merely have to re-release the .map source for the specific .bsp that was derived from the original .map?

To me the latter interpretation feels right, i mean otherwise a GPL quake engine can't be used to make a game where the art and levels are proprietery, but the engine source is released.

Therefore I would imagine that a GPL sound would merely require you to re-license any sounds or music based on it, not every level, texture, and model in your game that uses that sound. 

I guess the issue is static vs. dynamic linking. Any modern game has external data files that contain the art, music, sounds, etc, and these are "linked" at runtime, which is the reason (in my opinion) they don't get tainted by the same license as the engine code. And vice versa -- the engine doesn't get tainted by the license attached to the content it loads.

Doing some google searches, it sounds like the question of closed-source software dynamically linking to GPL software is somewhat contentious. One argument is that even if dynamic linking produces a derivative work, that work is created by the user at run-time, not by the software developer. I think the answer to this question would also answer the question of a proprietary game/mod that uses GPL content. 

The Creative Commons especially before 3.0 can be kind of a mess and requires a lot of overhead.

I read a critique of the CC by the Debian Linux people and an explanation of the strings with CC by a MMORPG game company.

There are a lot of hidden strings and caveats and CC licenses unlike the GPL aren't automatically updated to be compatible with a new version.

This means Creative Commons 2, 2.5 and 3 are incompatible with each other.

The CC is good for standalone works, but sucks for collaborative works or anything that is going to mix and match content. 

To all of you closed-source cunts who are exploiting the open-source bedrock of code released by fans in support of a nonprofit niche audience: fuck off. 

Your generic, smoldering rage notwithstanding ... who are you raging against specifically? 

Well, having decided that actually reading and comprehending the debate would take too much time, he saw the words GPL and open source and tried some fairly ineffective flame baiting. Just ignore the trolling and continue the conversation at something above pre-school level...

Speaking of which, does that really mean that you can just load whatever you want to keep non-open source at runtime without infringing the license (under either/both CC or GPL). So you could effectively sell a Quake if you created entirely new art content and just released the engine code/any improvements to it. (mebe something like Urban Terror the previously Q3 mod would be a better example, would they be able to sell that if they wanted?)

(ps. j0 momz) 

Apparently the word 'mod' is missing from that post. I'll leave you to work out where ;p

(I think it was kidnapped by evile rockers tbh) 

does that really mean that you can just load whatever mod you want to keep non-open source at runtime

Is it!? Is that where it was?!?!? :DDDD

Did I get it right?! 

A rotfish? 

No. Fail. 

And the prize is a test tube of Shambler's piss once I recieve my damn prize from the twat competition... 

Therefore I would imagine that a GPL sound would merely require you to re-license any sounds or music based on it, not every level, texture, and model in your game that uses that sound.

Yeah, but that is enough of a problem.

Of course it's a somewhat academic problem, since I probably may not alter id's sounds, for example, legally, in the first place :-P

Even mixing a CC-Attribution-Sharealike sound with a GPL sound produces a conflict - both licenses want the derivative work for themselves. Free software cunts struggling about who gets to limit my freedom.

The dynamic linking thing (engine, pak files...) might be a loophole, but mixing sound files is a pretty static thing. Unless you create a temporary entity that plays the GPL sound at the right time, on a free channel (mixing at runtime, using the engine as a mixer). You then have a derivative work that only exists for a short time - it's performed live in a way and only recorded by the player's brain.

...

see? Your brain must be GPLed. Wait, that creates a license conflict.

But yeah, it's academic. Half the Quake mods out there violate some license. Luckily, they're a fringe phenomenon and their authors neither make nor have money. Most of those mods are also history.

I just found the vegatarian story pretty funny. :)