Braindump of Licensing discussions for upstream Openbve.

The intent and appreciation for sharing and openness has always
present with upstream, as can be seen from the name.  Openbve was
itself a reaction to "freeware", but non-distributable and non-fixable
version of "BVE Train Sim".  

Although the intent has been constant, the wording has evolved,
attempting to remain short.  Upstream have welcome input where it as
been offered on licence-terminology; as can be seen, the preference
would be for copyright law to not exist (although international
treaties dictate otherwise.

Managed content

In Openbve=1.4.0.0 in-program managed content was introduced, Openbve
has gone out of their way to ensure that anything to be included in
the managed content repositary is explicitly distributable.  Although
this does affect Debian/Ubuntu directly, is shows the understanding
of the problems that can be present with explicit statements:

  http://trainsimframework.org/develop/managed/licenses.html


History

In 2008, in preparation for Debian packaging, discussion was started
with upstream for the upstream bugtracker/forum and is copied below
for context.  (It was at the time the closest introduction to the
licence and intent behind the Openbve project).

Forum thread from: 
  http://openbve.freeforums.org/licence-t39.html

== Licence ==

Post by Sacro on Sat, 26th Apr 2008, 16:39, UTC

Just out of curiosity, what licence applies to OpenBVE? It'd be nice
to know if it's GPL or BSD or whatever as I'm quite interested in
helping out.

Sacro

== Re: Licence ==

Post by michelle on Sun, 27th Apr 2008, 07:43, UTC

My attitude differs from so called "free software" licenses. I try to
explain:

With proprietary software, the developers usually try to restrict what
you are allowed to do with the software to the uttermost extreme that
is legally possible. This falls under the category of copyright.

Then there is something that is sometimes called green copyright. So
called free software falls in this category. As with proprietary
software, a license is used to tell users what they are allowed to do
and what not. The difference to proprietary software is that so called
free software licenses are usually much more permissive, yet the
author decides what you are allowed to do and what not. So called free
software is usually attributed to derive from "freedom" instead of
"free of charge". Still, if the author employs a license telling other
people what they can or cannot do, this inherently cannot have
anything to do with freedom.

Then there is something called public domain, which I consider to be
an inherently good thing as everyone has eventually the same rights as
the author. However, releasing a work into the public domain is not
legally meaningful in many countries. Also, releasing a work into the
public domain (if possible) depends on the generosity of the author,
and this decision is made by the author.

My attitude is even one step further: I am opposed to copyright, thus
I marked the game with the legally not meaningful phrase of
"anti-copyright". It is legally meaningless, because in every country
that has some form of copyright, it would require these laws to be
abandoned. Still, why do I have this attitude?

With a license, I would be telling other people what they can or
cannot do. I am not such a person. I will not make any silly
restrictions on how you can use this program, I will not tell you to
put my name on any derived work, I will never ever give "permission"
for you modify or redistribute the software, because I don't think
that it is up to me telling you what you can or can't do. You should
make this decision for yourself.

I hope this briefly explained the situation.

User avatar
michelle

== Re: Licence ==

Post by michelle on Sat, 14th Feb 2009, 18:00, UTC

I have been approached by some individuals over the time, including
from the GNU project and the Ubuntu Foundation (as it appears at
least), and was told that they lack a means of "legal security" for
reuse without an explicit license. You can read my above post on
details about my attitude regarding this matter, but as a start, I
have decided to put the following line on the homepage and will also
include it in any later release:

  " This program, along with all documentation provided, is dedicated
    to the public. I do not pose any restrictions on how this material
    can be used, and explicitly encourage redistribution and
    modification for any purpose. "

michelle

== Re: Licence ==

Way to go Michelle!

Good to hear from another lonely soul out there who gets the true
meaning of freedom.

BVEColorado
