Source management and Licensing for Mods

[orzelek]

As someone who worked with Visual SourceSafe (long time ago) and then Perforce I do understand benefits of SCM.

And I used git.. and didn't like it.

Question is - why do you want to force people to use git?
From what I read here there seems to be an opinion that not using it is wrong. And for me it's a question of preference - nothing else.

[kiba]

As someone who worked with Visual SourceSafe (long time ago) and then Perforce I do understand benefits of SCM.

And I used git.. and didn't like it.

Question is - why do you want to force people to use git?
From what I read here there seems to be an opinion that not using it is wrong. And for me it's a question of preference - nothing else.

I don't care if people don't use git, but it's very helpful if people use git, since that's what everyone use. But I am not buying the excuses of not learning some kind of version control system or issuing some kind of copyright license.

The overhead is so small as to be non-existent.

The hard part is modding and debugging functionality of your mod. Those are 10X time harder than anything else.

[Koub]

A modder who's also a dev (by job, by personal interest, or because having attended a dev school) will see the interest of licencing his job, using github,writing clean code, nicely documented and indented, and overall doing things the proper way. I have studied developpment when I was in my engineering school, and even if I have not worked in software dev when I got out of school, and for the 15 years that have followed, and I just viscerally can't write a vba macro for my Excel workbooks without adding a proper revision history, documenting, indenting properly, using explicit option to force variable is properly declared, give my variables and functions explicit names, all with the same formalism.

I have collegues, on the other hand, who don't have that "dev fiber". For them, no matter what, as long as it works, it's ok. I guess "dev modders" will want to work cleanly, even if it's not for a professionnal purpose. On the other hand, "amateur modders" (this is by no means pejorative) just want to mod whatever they want modded, and ... well ... that's about it. They don't see the point of setting rules for them as they don't care.

I'd see it as passing a driving license. You don't actually need all the stuff you have to learn and master to drive. Anyone with 5 hours of lessons can start the engine, turn the driving wheel, and use the gearshift and 3 pedals. And that's perfectly OK if you drive in your own property all alone. The thing is if you share the road you're on with hundreds and more other drivers, using blinkers, mirrors and stuff might be nice.

Same thing with git, licensing and stuff : If you think the world just should be grateful for your mod and get used to you, then just fine. If you think it's your duty to integrate in how the world works, then you'll spend more time doing efforts towards that.

[MischaB]

Hello Factorio-Community,

I'm currently searching for a few mods that I could use on my planned semi-public Server.
And on my journey through all these awesome mods I found a few (maybe even a lot, i didn't count) mods that are licensed under "creatice commons".

My advice to the people who have done so is to change to a software-specific license (maybe MIT).
While you can apply a CC license to software, you should not do that because CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code.

You can read more about that topic here

Personal note:
If you find any mistakes in grammar or spelling feel free to correct me. English isn't my native language ^^)

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged two topics.

[golfmiketango]

I know that modders in general are not submerged in the open source ethos, but please do not use non-commercial licenses. It makes it incompatible for sharing with mods that are much more liberal in their licensing.

Wait, isn't this contradicting itself - are you sure you did not meant to write "please use non-commercial licenses" as this makes it easier to share?

I could misunderstand exaclty what "non-commercial lcense" means tho, in that case - please ignore my comment.

Probably the latter -- quoting http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC:

What is commercial use? The relevant clause out of Creative Commons non-commercial (“-NC”) licenses, such as the “Attribution-NonCommercial” license, is this one:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You … in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

The psychic appeal of such a restriction is, I presume, the understandable, if slightly petty sentiment: "I am not making any money off of this, and I created it. If anyone is going to make money off it, it should be me, so unless you agree not to use this thing to make money, you can't have it."

There's no intrinsic problem with such a restriction, but certain other popular licenses slice and dice "intellectual property"

IP-is-a-scam-rant

I don't really believe in this idea of intellectual property -- I personally tend to think the idea that we can "own" information, but "pirates" can "steal" it from us, is, in fact, a kind of linguistic short-hand, at best (or at worst, a kind of culturally transmitted brainwashing) based on the surmise that incorporeal information (i.e., fairy tales) shares enough properties with corporeal information (i.e., ham sandwiches), that we should apply the same legal constructs we designed for the corporeal stuff to the incorporeal stuff. But that's a very long, off-topic story you probably don't care about, and regardless, I'm talking here about the idea of IP in the minds of legal authorities -- I'm quite confident those constructs really are in the actual minds of the actual legal authorities, even if they are not valid or good constructs, just as "Joe said he likes ice-cream" is a fact, not an opinion.

in such a way as to basically wind up saying, amongst other things, "you can borrow this program from me, and tinker with it. But only on the condition that you promise that, should you ever mix up my program (let's call it "X") with some other program ("Y"), which has this non-commercial restriction on it, you will not redistribute the resulting new hypothetical mixed-together X+Y program (let's call it "Z"). So, for example, let's say you take code from Linux (which is GPLv2) and mix it with code from Microsoft's Daytona, which is licensed as free-as-in-beer for non-commercial use (under the "Microsoft Research License"). You now have a hybrid thingy.

IANAL but AFAICS the GPL and the Microsoft Research Licenses seem to allow you to do this -- it's perfectly fine. But, what you can't do, legally, is share that hybrid program "Z" with anyone else (because Linux expects you to promise you won't mix your program up in that particular way and redistribute it, so you are reading the Linux source code, you theoretically agreed not to do it (because the GPLv2 says so)). Of course, you also couldn't legally use the hybrid program to make money (since Microsoft Daytona expects you to promise you won't do that, if want to use Daytona (because the Microsoft Research License says so)).

Basically the GPL sucks all software into one of two vortexes: compatible with GPL, and not compatible with the GPL. If something isn't compatible with the GPL, you can still do mostly whatever you want with it as far as the GPL is concerned. But if you mix incompatible stuff with GPL stuff, you can't show anybody. You have to hide it like a dirty secret or something, and your dirty secret is not GPL-licensed, it's just some kind of weird poisoned code-base; I'm not even sure the rules of such tainted code bases are fully understood (i.e., can your employee fix bugs in it? Or is that distribution?) Anyhow I don't think GPL cares -- the whole agenda of GPL is probably to act as a kind of intellectual property virus that sucks everything into the "GPL compatible" vortex and FUDDs everything else out of existence. Since lots and lots of stuff is GPL, that is exactly what happens in practice, which is probably what kiba means above.

[bobingabout]

To quote my maths teacher: "It depends what socks I put on in the morning."

Lets just say, the intellectual property thing stems from... You put 100 hours making a birdhouse, it is your birdhouse, you own it, can sell it if you want to, and nobody has the right to steal it. You spend 100 hours painting a work of art, same deal. You put 100 hours into writing a book, why can't you treat said book and it's contents the same way? Extend that even further, you do it digitally, you write a story on a computer, is that not yours, just the same as the book, or the painting? Now instead of a story, write a Program, or a mod, create some assets. It's still 100 hours of work regardless of the end result, therefore, it should be treat the same.

Of course, some people are "Nice", and just let you use it for free, but that's all it is, being nice, it's like letting someone look at your birdhouse, or painting, the book being read at a public reading, or borrowed from a library, yet because of the easily editable nature of digital information, some people feel the rules should be different. In my opinion, it should have the same rules and laws applied as an artist's rights, like a painting, or a book.

Just think about it.


Now, this topic is about mods. The mods wouldn't exist at all if factorio didn't exist, so ultimately, any mod is the vicarious property of the factorio team. The rest of it should then be seen as the intellectual property as the author, and although... because it is vicariously the property of the factorio team, there's probably not much anyone can legally do about the "theft" of a mod, lets call it "Polite" and "Playing nice" if you follow these rules that would and should apply as if you'd written a program, or a book, a painting, or even, a bird house.

[kiba]

To quote my maths teacher: "It depends what socks I put on in the morning."

Lets just say, the intellectual property thing stems from... You put 100 hours making a birdhouse, it is your birdhouse, you own it, can sell it if you want to, and nobody has the right to steal it. You spend 100 hours painting a work of art, same deal. You put 100 hours into writing a book, why can't you treat said book and it's contents the same way? Extend that even further, you do it digitally, you write a story on a computer, is that not yours, just the same as the book, or the painting? Now instead of a story, write a Program, or a mod, create some assets. It's still 100 hours of work regardless of the end result, therefore, it should be treat the same.

What is your point exactly? Nobody is forcing you to open source your mods.

Of course, some people are "Nice", and just let you use it for free, but that's all it is, being nice, it's like letting someone look at your birdhouse, or painting, the book being read at a public reading, or borrowed from a library, yet because of the easily editable nature of digital information, some people feel the rules should be different. In my opinion, it should have the same rules and laws applied as an artist's rights, like a painting, or a book.

We benefit from materials being available to the common, allowing for a greater diversity and better mods. That is why I license my work under the MIT and sometime encourage people to do so.

[bobingabout]

What is your point exactly? Nobody is forcing you to open source your mods.

It's aimed as a response to golfmiketango's post.

[kiba]

What is your point exactly? Nobody is forcing you to open source your mods.

It's aimed as a response to golfmiketango's post.

He's right.

Intellectual property is not the same thing as property. It's a linguistic shorthand.

Anyway, that isn't particularly relevant to the discussion.

[Blu3wolf]

What is your point exactly? Nobody is forcing you to open source your mods.

It's aimed as a response to golfmiketango's post.

He's right.

Intellectual property is not the same thing as property. It's a linguistic shorthand.

Anyway, that isn't particularly relevant to the discussion.

Well we can at least agree that any further discussion of his OT post is something for another thread. Lets keep this one on track.

[SyncViews]

I see some mods using the GPL.

Is this actually a valid license for mods? It seems to me that as in-process plugins, that the viral GPL license would then include the distribution of Factorio and its source code, which is obviously not possible.

[ratchetfreak]

I see some mods using the GPL.

Is this actually a valid license for mods? It seems to me that as in-process plugins, that the viral GPL license would then include the distribution of Factorio and its source code, which is obviously not possible.

It's a valid license; licenses only applies to what you distribute. People are not allowed to distribute factorio to other people (by its own license). So GPL will only ever apply to the mod code. However it does block the factorio devs from integrating the mod as it would block them from keeping the source private.

Though adding an exception that the factorio software does not fall under GPL and is allowed to remain bundled under a non-gpl-compatible license.

[SyncViews]

But if I have a GPL plugin, and i cant distribute everything, as required by the GPL, then I cant distribute the plugin.

Least that is my understanding from the normal C++ and Java work I do (both compiled). Is there a clear case for Lua to be different? You still require in Factorio APIs.

[Blu3wolf]

But if I have a GPL plugin, and i cant distribute everything, as required by the GPL, then I cant distribute the plugin.

Least that is my understanding from the normal C++ and Java work I do (both compiled). Is there a clear case for Lua to be different? You still require in Factorio APIs.

What do you mean, you cant distribute everything? You can distribute the mod which is itself a script, and thus is itself the source file for the mod.

I see some mods using the GPL.

Is this actually a valid license for mods? It seems to me that as in-process plugins, that the viral GPL license would then include the distribution of Factorio and its source code, which is obviously not possible.

It's a valid license; licenses only applies to what you distribute. People are not allowed to distribute factorio to other people (by its own license). So GPL will only ever apply to the mod code. However it does block the factorio devs from integrating the mod as it would block them from keeping the source private.

Though adding an exception that the factorio software does not fall under GPL and is allowed to remain bundled under a non-gpl-compatible license.

any GPL mod would not block factorio integration from code being private.

If for example Factorio version 0.13 came out tomorrow, and included with it as a pre-installed mod, Treefarm-Lite 0.3.7, that would be IAW the GPL (which Treefarm-Lite 0.3.7 is licensed under). They could not integrate it with their base mod though, as the base mod is closed source.

[SyncViews]

In what way do mods not count as linking as a dll/so/jar does? None of these mods added an exception, there is an explicit bit about OS libraries (e.g. kernel32.dll etc), and LGPL allows exactly this in general (seperate possibly closed time runtime, but not source components)

[Blu3wolf]

I believe that Factorio constitutes a System Library in the context of the GPLv3. Something that you dont need to include with GPLed programs.

The mod in question is considered the 'work' in the terms of the GPL, and as it is not conveyed in an 'aggregate' form, the terms of that section are immaterial.

[Blu3wolf]

Also, even if its not, the exception is for allowing you to convey the modified work. None of the mods mentioned have conveyed a non GPL work. Clearly if it is installed and used with Factorio, that factorio install and the mod are one program under the GPL. It would seem that that would prevent Factorio from including GPL mods with its standard distribution, as it itself is not free. Its not clear that Treefarms existence requires it only be distributed as part of a complete Factorio install though, as you assert.

In short Treefarm will continue to not include Factorio, and require than users source that program separately. Users wishing to distribute Treefarm with Factorio would need to comply with both Treefarms license and Factorios license, which is obviously not possible.

[TheSAguy]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this...
I have a question on licencing. I'd like to use some code from an existing mod. They already have all the code/functions written, so why re-invent the wheel.

The Mod licence says: "Blab blah is licensed with the CC BY-NC-ND license.

My question is, is it okay if I use the code from this mod, modify it slightly to fit my needs?
I asked the author, but got no response.
I don't want to step on any toes. I'll give all credit to the author!, include the licence...
Not trying to stir up the pot, just want to know what I can and can't do.

Thanks.

[Blu3wolf]

Not unless the author of the mod gives you permission (which would be an alternate license to use their work, instead of the one presented). The -ND part is the issue - the No Derivatives clause is pretty clear cut.

As a minor note, Creative Commons recommend software not be licensed using their licenses.