Hello. I have a question concerning the License Compliance of today’s 0.52 release of Unvanquished.
So, today’s announcement says (from the best of my understanding) that everything related to Unvanquished is now Free Software; Free as in Freedom. However, it also states that removing all Tremulous assets was removed as a goal for the 0.52 release. How can both statements be true?
If I remember correctly from reading past posts; it was specifically the remaining Tremulous assets (if I remember correctly some sound files [anything else?]) that could not have their ownership traced to be verified as license compliant.
So, I’m confused on the situation here. The announcement says several times statements like the fallowing.
“Everything from the game, from engine to game code to assets, is tracked in Git repositories. Our game is now open source in every aspect. Anyone can now produce portable release-like builds of the game. We have a compatible level editor. We strengthened our infrastructure. The engine reached the level of quality we wanted, etc.”
“And of course, after a huge asset audit and contacting many contributors, our game is now considered open source in every aspect. You can read the Now we are free! blog post and also the Story of a tree one about this topic…”
But, when I read “Now we are free!” I read the fallowing.
“What’s left on asset replacement
We still want to replace the sound effects inherited from Tremulous.
Tremulous has been considered free and open source for almost fifteen years already, so using those assets may not give us any trouble on that side. That said, those assets are hard to trace, so we prefer to replace them.
In any case, until they are replaced, those sound effects can’t make Unvanquished less open source than Tremulous.”
Then, that loops me back to today’s announcement saying that, “We also decided to pull the complete replacement of all Tremulous assets from the Beta objective, because that has no impact on gameplay anyway…”
This is disappointing as I have been considering maybe getting into modding and trying to create a game. I have been waiting for the 0.52 release so that all the code and assets would be securely licensed and the game code would be separated from the engine before I even start. It seemed that sense the release was coming soon (here now) that it would make the most sense to wait for it before starting anything.
But, now that the assets from Tremulous have not been fully pulled I am concerned as to their state of license compliance.
I mean, “using those assets may not give us any trouble on that side” and “those sound effects can’t make Unvanquished less open source than Tremulous” sounds wishy washy and doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid, but it sounds more like ‘well, nobody’s complained or sued us so I guess we’re good’ more than it sounds like ‘everything has actually been verified.’
I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. Nor do I want to belittle all the work that has been done. The new version of your engine and game look amazing. But, if I can figure out modding and actually get my game off the ground; I don’t want to get myself sued.
So, my question is, is everything, including the engine and art assets, actually license compliant or not?
Or, are there still some assets that are just assumed to be compliant because they came from Tremulous and nobody complained so it’s kind of just a ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ situation that could come back and bite me.
Thank you for your time.