How do you think about %TOPIC_TITLE%quot;Forbidden license%TOPIC_TITLE%quot; paragraph?

Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby ChimneySwift » Sat Aug 18, 2018 8:10 am

Wuzzy wrote:So, if you still believe in an obscure scenario in which an attribution clause does not actually work, look for evidence. Otherwise your fears are pretty much baseless. So far I am not aware of ANY cases in which the CC BY attribution clause has failed the author or that a licensee found a loophole which allowed them to plagiarize or not give proper credit while still being able to legally use the work. It is generally understood that a failure to attribute under CC BY is a full-blown violation of copyright.


Agreed. I think I'm not the only one that's getting a little bit tired of all this licensing garbage :P. Licenses aren't supposed to be this controversial, just follow the rules/terms and if you can't do that, don't post on the forums. If you don't like our solutions, just saying you're "worried" and not accepting them without any foundation or reasoning will just result in frustration.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby KGM » Sat Aug 18, 2018 9:47 am

found case:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc- ... 07410.html
Kent Mewhort(?) wrote on linked site wrote:Ugh, that is ugly -- and I think you're right that the same could tactic
could be leveraged with the trademark attribution requirement in CC
4.0d4. I believe a requirement to attribute with a trademark would
generally imply a limited license with respect to that mark, but not if
explicit text to the contrary accompanies the attribution request. For
example, if Foobar Inc. made a derivative work that comes under
CC-BY-SA, it seems they could effectively redistribute it commercially
and non-openly with something along the lines of:

"Pursuant to section 3(A)(1)(a) of our CC-BY-SA license, we require
you to visibly mark this work or any derivative works with the Foobar
Inc. logo. Please see this webpage for our trademark licensing options
(note that the CC-BY_SA license does not grant you any permission to use
Foobar Inc trade-marks; you must license these from us separately)".

Perhaps this is a loophole that needs explicit plugging in this section
of the CC license. Maybe "You must...identify the creator(s) of the
Licensed Material and others designated to receive attribution, in any
reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym or
trademark; if by trademark, the Licensor grants you permission to use
the trademark for the purposes of attribution)."


It means, if you distribute free software under such cc license, i can make unfree derivates! and do the whole think 100% LEGAL.

and that thread was found on 2013!

licenses granting many freedoms are dangerous to handle, and i don't think either me or you have enough legal knowledge to do so. anyway, the vultures have, because thats their business.

THE TALE OF WUZ (FICTION)

wuz made a mineccraft like subgame, he released it under CC BY SA x.x

vulture <devil@666.dev> forked the subgame, adding many decorations.

he sells the whole thing, taking much of little kids' pocket money.

wuz wants to release a free fork, as he does not want to register thousands of decorative blocks.

wuz releases his free fork, following the attribution instructions given : he gives credits to the vulture using his trademarks logo, as the vulture stated in the license aggreement.

the vulture accuses wuzzy of using a protected trademarks logo.

and at court the whole think then looks like the following. (sorry, i don't know much about court)

vulture : you used my trademarks protected logo without allowance to do so, this violates § blah blah blah

wuz : but you stated that i should use it to give attributes!

vulture : yes, but i did not allow you to use it anyway. without that allowance, using it for attribution violates § blah blah blah

judge : herewith i instruct wuz to remove the trademarks logo from his publication.

wuz removes logo.

the vulture accuses wuzzy of violating copyright with his derivative works publication.

the next day, wuzz is in front of the court again.

vulture : you redistribute a derivate of my mcgame, without giving appropiate credits, as you don't use my trademarks logo for that. that is a copyright violation as stated in CC BY SA x.x § blah blah blah. your derivate cost my company devil666 $100000 of missed income, as proven by this, this and this and this evidence.

wuz : but i am not allowed to use it! see, i also replaced it with a huge text with your name and your email.

vulture : but i clearly stated that you have to use my trademarks logo. everything else is incorrect attribution as stated in CC BY SA x.x § blub. incorrect attribution is a copyright violation, as stated in CC BY SA x.x § blah blah blah.

judge : herewith i sentence wuz to $100000 compensation since his derivate cost devil666 $100000 of missed income and i instruct him to remove his publication.

wuz now lives at the subsistence level.

END OF THE STORY

I don't want to have to hire a lawyer every time when licensing my stuff. so i use unfree licenses.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby LMD » Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:11 am

What I found out WTFPL :
probably we should not recommend it ?
In 2009, the Open Source Initiative chose not to approve the license as an open-source license, saying:[1]

It's no different from dedication to the public domain. Author has submitted license approval request – author is free to make public domain dedication. Although he agrees with the recommendation, Mr. Michlmayr notes that public domain doesn't exist in Europe. Recommend: Reject.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Also, I wanted to mention my brother's not the only one who'd like to use unfree licenses.
I heard of some server admins who don't even dare to RELEASE their stuff, as EVEN if they would choose an unfree license, their code could be stolen. Beautiful work therefore gets (almost) hidden from this community.

Saying all people are generally good guys is a quite naive sight.
I am though licensing my stuff under GPLv3 - cuz - it's just not something "great".
If I were about to really invent sth great, I'd for sure use something more restrictive than GPL.
(Magic-CTF does not count as something great, it's good but not great)
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby Wuzzy » Sat Aug 18, 2018 11:02 pm

@KGM: None of the CC licenses should be used for software. It's discouraged by CC (the organization) and pretty much any other organization). It's might not be the end of the world, nor is it neccessarily unethical, the discouragement is more for practical reasons; these licenses were simply not designed for software.

The discussion you linked to was about a DRAFT of a CC license. And it's from 2013. It might be outdated by now. But if that problem they showed has not been fixed in the final version, that would indeed suck badly and turn the entire CC project into a laughingstock and basically makes the ShareAlike clause pointless. CC BY-SA would probably still be a free license, but with broken copyleft.
Also, 4.0d4, WTF? This would mean this loophole (if it's real) managed to survive unnoticed through versions 1.0 to 3.0!

I think you should join the CC mailing list and start discussing things since you started picking up mails full of technical jargon, that was probably not an accident. I have the feeling you might have something to say to them. I have no idea if they plugged the loophole by now.

Anyway, CC licenses are not recommended for software anyway, let's not forget that.

That was the one thing …

As your your “story”: As it's just made up, it doesn't proof anything. Also, I think you are trying very hard to delude and convince yourself of a danger that doesn't exist.

Your conclusion does not make sense. The danger you outlined is that you use the work of someone else, violate some supposed right and get attacked for it. This can happen with normal copyright or any license if you violate the terms.
However, this is about someone else's copyrighted stuff. As for your own stuff, you don't have to worry. You cannot technically violate your own copyright or license. You have the right to do (basically) whatever with your stuff, nobody can sue you for your own work, no matter the license. Also, your story is awfully specific. This also could only work if there's a trademark to violate to begin with. Not every programmer registers trademarks. Also note that trademark is a whole new can of worms, separate from copyright.

You always have the danger of violating someone, no matter how you license your own stuff. Therefore, your conclusion is flawed: It does not make sense to lock down your stuff because you might get sued for violating your own license. That's simply not possible. You never must obey your own license. You are not more or less under a threat of copyright infringement for the license you choose for your own stuff.

The correct conclusion for a person who is paranoid about copyright would be to avoid publicly (re-)using other people's stuff with unclear permissions. That is, if you're paranoid at all, of course.

I heard of some server admins who don't even dare to RELEASE their stuff, as EVEN if they would choose an unfree license, their code could be stolen. Beautiful work therefore gets (almost) hidden from this community.

This might be justified for privacy reasons. Also, it's not neccessarily unethical since nobody's freedom is removed. The only user is the programmer, and they have all the freedoms, obviously. It is not a goal of the free software movement to force people to share all code ever written with the world. That would be quite draconian and anti-freedom, actually.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby Jordach » Sun Aug 19, 2018 12:50 pm

Wuzzy wrote:It is not a goal of the free software movement to force people to share all code ever written with the world. That would be quite draconian and anti-freedom, actually.

It seems that irony appears to be lost on you. Enforcing FOSS licenses as a global rule? You know damn well that kills people's ideas for wanting to develop games for the engine...
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby rubenwardy » Sun Aug 19, 2018 3:13 pm

It doesn't stop people from developing games, just from distributing and promoting proprietary ones on the forums. This puts them at the level of any other non-minetest game anyway
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby KGM » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:01 pm

I will make a mt content search engine that WILL INCLUDE PROPIETARY SOFTWARE!
the search engine is finished, it just needs db contents, wich i will add using python crawlers.
soon propietary stuff will be available too!
and i will link to my search engine on this forum!
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby Linuxdirk » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:17 pm

I wonder what the forum admins think about proprietary 3rd party crawlers accessing the forum to provide a closed-source search engine.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby LMD » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:36 pm

MTPC offers Crawlers, too.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby rubenwardy » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:38 pm

Worth noting that you should make sure your crawler doesn't DDoS the website (ie: rate limit it) and ask celeron55 for permission/the best times to crawl. Also worth noting that such a project would be completely pointless given the multitude of good crawlers already available with good public APIs
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby LMD » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:57 pm

rubenwardy wrote:doesn't DDoS the website (ie: rate limit it)

What does that mean(not a native speaker) ?
I agree it's quite pointless. I would have made my own, but what for ? Theres already enough. Maybe I'll do sth, but then it should be really different.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby KGM » Mon Aug 20, 2018 4:24 pm

rubenwardy wrote:Worth noting that you should make sure your crawler doesn't DDoS the website (ie: rate limit it) and ask celeron55 for permission/the best times to crawl. Also worth noting that such a project would be completely pointless given the multitude of good crawlers already available with good public APIs

thx, this simplyfies everything a lot, do these pages get updated?
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby KGM » Mon Aug 20, 2018 7:42 pm

what is the release number?
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby KGM » Tue Aug 21, 2018 9:20 am

where do i get the permission to process your apis data?
need some legal binding permission.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby migdyn » Tue Apr 23, 2019 10:38 am

I love it. It prevents people from submitting proprietary mods that have spying functionality or other malicious features. I'm pretty sure that some people would post malicious software disguised as a mod
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby ChimneySwift » Tue Apr 23, 2019 12:00 pm

migdyn wrote:I love it.


That reply was totally worth digging up this dusty old topic
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby Wuzzy » Tue Apr 23, 2019 3:31 pm

@migdyn: False. The paragraph actually ALLOWS posting of proprietary mods.

Namely, licenses that forbid “commercial use”* are perfectly fine. Such licenses are generally considered proprietary. Also, other licenses that restrict a certain kind of other use are also perfectly allowed, like a crazy license that forbids schools to use the mod for some reason. Or a license that discriminates against a certain group of people.

Licenses that restrict a form of use of the software are so blatantly obviously against free software AND open source ideals, I still don't understand we're still having this discussion.

* = Whatever “commercial use” means. Could mean that re-posting a mod on a private website with a single ad banner is “commercial” and thus in violation, even if it just earns pennies.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby rubenwardy » Tue Apr 23, 2019 3:41 pm

Wuzzy wrote:Also, other licenses that restrict a certain kind of other use are also perfectly allowed, like a crazy license that forbids schools to use the mod for some reason. Or a license that discriminates against a certain group of people.


This has changed:

Rules wrote:Allowed licenses: The use of licenses which do not allow derivatives or redistribution is not permitted for mods, games, and texture packs. This includes CC-ND (No-Derivatives) and most other non-free licenses. The use of licenses which discriminate between groups of people or forbid the use of the content on servers or singleplayer is also not permitted. This applies where ever the content is found, including but not limited to any forum or signatures
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Look ma, I can h4x ur r00lz!!1!

Postby Wuzzy » Tue Apr 23, 2019 5:11 pm

Finding loopholes is fun!
Here are some bad clauses that would still be perfectly fine under the current rule set (even considering the sentence you just quoted):

  • “You may not use the mod in a school” (a school is not a “group of people”)
  • “You may not use the mod if you are rubenwardy” (=not a group of people)
  • “You may not use the mod in a commercial manner” (a clause that can be interpreted very broadly to include redistribution on a single banner ad on a webpage. Monetized YouTube vids are also banned, of course)
  • “You may not use the mod on a Mac computer”
  • “You may not use the mod for educational purposes”
  • “You may use the mod only for educational purposes”
  • “You may use the mod only if you post to 5 random people on Facebook”
  • “You may use Bucket Game only in Final Minetest, not in Old Minetest 5”
  • “You may redistribute the source code, but you must NOT read it” xD
  • “You may not try to reverse-engineer my obfuscated code”
  • “You may not use the mod to make videos on YouTube, but Vimeo is OK”
  • “You may not depend on this mod / use its API without paying me a tiny, really insignificant royalty of only $1,000,000”
  • “You may not <insert all of the above>” ;-)

I could go on forever, I think you get the idea. They are all some form of restrictions of a particular use or a blatant discrimination or demand something silly.

I consider all these restrictions to be bad and don't represent what Minetest stands for (quite the contrary!). Their effect is all the same: They all attack the user. For the distributor of the software, these clauses have no obvious benefit either. The distributor is not really harmed if one of these “violations” happen. So any rhetoric of “I need to protect my own interests” does not really make much sense here. What happens is that the user is worse off, but the distributor is not better off. Such clauses only make sense if screwing over the user was the actual goal.

There's a very good reason why there is the point “Discriminating against a field of endaveor” in the Open Source Definition and the DFSG and the freedom 0 in the Free Software Definition. They exist precisely to weed out stupid restrictive clauses like those above.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby rubenwardy » Tue Apr 23, 2019 5:30 pm

You forget that we are humans, and reserve the right to remove content even if it attempts to violate a loophole
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby benrob0329 » Fri Apr 26, 2019 1:29 am

How does that song go? "Copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left. Copying makes one thing more, that's what copyings for!"

If you have a mod that I can't make a derivative of, then I probably can't use it on my server because I often slightly modify mods to better integrate with each other. For example, I modified Xdecor to add mesecons support to the doors, but that PR still hasn't been merged into the master branch of Xdecor. If it was proprietary, I simply would not be allowed to do so.

What happens if you disappear from the forums? How will I be able to "ask for permission to fork" your mod? Do you like seeing your work go down in flames because you decided it was better to keep it all for yourself? You might think that's odd of me to say, but if you only want something for you, then why did you post it for others to use?

I make YouTube videos for example, and they are all either CC-BY or CC-BY-SA whenever other restrictions don't force me to license it differently (such as when using other people's work, but even then I'll often make a stipulation where anything I made personally is still CC-BY-SA if someone wanted to use it). Because if I only made these videos for me, I wouldn't have released them to the general public. I still require credit, I did spend many hours making it, but I enjoy seeing people remix things and would love it if someone did that to my work.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby LMD » Fri Apr 26, 2019 12:57 pm

"You may not try to reverse-engineer my obfuscated code"
You got a problem with that ?
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby Wuzzy » Fri Apr 26, 2019 2:15 pm

@rubenwardy: My point is that these loopholes could be plugged fairly easily by simply referring to the OSI/FSF recommendations. Simply allow licenses that are approved by either OSI or FSF. They know their stuff.

And “restricting usage” is actually not a minor loophole. I wish you would actually at least try to argue here. That's disappointing.

Do you think that licenses that restrict usage or discriminate are OK? Do you think they still count as free software / open source?

To clarify:
Current forum rules are close to those recommendations anyway, but there are missing points. To generalize the loopholes I posted above:

- Licenses that restrict usage of the software in some way (or dictate how you use it) are still OK. “Using the software” is very essential, if the license does not even allow you that, then that's a really bad restriction. Isn't this obvious?
- Licenses that discriminate against individuals are still OK. Probably just an oversight.

The 2nd loophole has not been abused so far, but I have seen a few cases in which the 1st loophole was openly abused and it was accepted anyway.
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby benrob0329 » Fri Apr 26, 2019 7:01 pm

I believe this is a good reference for FOSS guidelines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_ ... Guidelines
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Re: How do you think about "Forbidden license" paragraph?

Postby LMD » Sat Apr 27, 2019 9:01 am

If you have a mod that I can't make a derivative of, then I probably can't use it on my server because I often slightly modify mods to better integrate with each other. For example, I modified Xdecor to add mesecons support to the doors, but that PR still hasn't been merged into the master branch of Xdecor. If it was proprietary, I simply would not be allowed to do so.

What happens if you disappear from the forums? How will I be able to "ask for permission to fork" your mod? Do you like seeing your work go down in flames because you decided it was better to keep it all for yourself? You might think that's odd of me to say, but if you only want something for you, then why did you post it for others to use?

- benrob0329
I believe this is everyone's free decision. If you want your work to go down in flames, no problem. Also, not every license forbides modifiying your mod for a server - furthermore, how should they prove the license violation - but many only disallow you to publish a modified version. This makes sense in order to fulfill the "Tentacles of evil" test which Minetest has clearly failed :
Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. To be free, the license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Fr ... Guidelines, as of the date of this post
It may not be the author taking away the required freedoms, but others, releasing closed versions of a software and some, for example, making their users pay : Forum Post : "Making a list of Minetest forks for Android and iOS"

TL;DR : Stop using MIT(or LGPL) for large projects with loads of work and just stick with GPLv3, or even better, AGPLv3
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