"Celestia Community License" A proposal to conside

[Don. Edwards]

This is the "Celestia Community License" that I will include in all my future releases. Anyone who creates any Texture or Add-On needs to consider using something like this to confirm your rights over your own personal work. It only makes good logical sense to protect your work.
This is my proposal for how the Celestia Community License should be written. If someone has any better idea than please chime in with your ideas and we can add them to the body of the text.

"Celestia Community License"
1. All Textures or Add-Ons are provided free of charge, provided they are used for non-profit, personal, and/or educational purposes.
2. Texture or Add-On creators take no responsibility for any adverse effects their work has on your computer as in hardware or its software (operating system, or any graphic utility editor, game, or simulator).
3. Textures or Add-Ons may be redistributed on physical media, and/or mirrored on other sites, provided the original creator gives consent, and a credit is included and a link to there website is given if they have one.
4. Textures or Add-Ons may be modified and redistributed online, or as above, where the author gives consent and a credit is given.
5. If the author cannot be contacted after a 6 month time period, the work can be redistributed as in 3, but must not be altered from its original form.
6. If any alteration is done to said Texture or Add-On the author must be notified as soon as possible. If after a 6 month period the author does not return contact then the said Texture or Add-On in its modified form can not be redistributed by any means and standard copyright laws apply.
7. All Textures or Add-Ons remain the sole property of the original creator unless they give said Texture or Add-On to another entity for sole ownership and redistribution rights. Upon releasing ownership of said Texture or Add-On the new owner entity is then responsible to maintain the above protocols of the Celestia Community License.
8. Once a Texture or Add-On has been released under the Celestia Community License that Texture or Add-On must always remain under said License and remain non-profit.
9. The owner or creator is not bound to keep any new Texture or Add-On under the Celestia Community License. Those works are separate until the owner or creator decides to place the said Texture or Add-On under the Celestia Community License. Then all above rules will apply.
10. The Celestia Community License does not bind the author from gaining profit from any newly created Texture or Add-On in the future. As it is completely up to the author or creator to decide whether their work will or will not fall under the Celestia Community License. If said Texture or Add-On is made for profit but the author or creator should decide to then place said Texture or Add-On under the Celestia Community License it then must be made a nonprofit Texture or Add-On and all Celestia Community License rules must then apply.

I hope this clarifies my standing on this subject. I feel this is the best way to cover our collected butts from getting our worked ripped off or used with another program without ever knowing about it.

Don. Edwards

[Christophe]

Why restrict your licence to non-commercial use? Celestia is GPL after all.

That means that if someone wants to sell or distribute Celestia on a CD, like The Open CD for example, your add-ons probably won't be included.

But anyway the choice is yours.

Another comment: writting a legaly valid licence is a very difficult task, you can very easily leave a loophole that someone could use to work arround your intended meaning. I think it would be best for you to use or start with an existing similar licence rather than writting your own from scratch.

You can have a look at OSI approved licences here:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
As you can see there are many to chose from. They offer varying degrees of freeness, so you can probably find one that suits you.

[Rassilon]

I personally dont agree that 'anyone' can sell and redistribute Celestia for thier own profit...

If thats what you ment by the above statement...

I personally dont care what others do with my textures as long as thier creative and its not blatant that thier copying my work...

[Christophe]

I personally dont agree that 'anyone' can sell and redistribute Celestia for thier own profit...

It's obvious from reading the GPL, that you can't really do that with GPLed software, although it is legally possible you can't sell something that is available somewhere else for free, you have to add some value to it.

That value can be packaging (CD for people without broadband internet access, bundling add-ons...), hardcopy documentation, email/telephone support... etc.

That's the way free software, and free software companies work. I think it's a good system.

If thats what you ment by the above statement...

I personally dont care what others do with my textures as long as thier creative and its not blatant that thier copying my work...

I don't understand. If someone distributes your textures for a profit (or not) they are not copying it as long as they give you credit.

What does matter to you: that no-one makes profit off your work or that they give you credit, or both?

[Henrik]

I agree with Christophe. If you apply that license to SOFTWARE or its component parts, then it must be under an OSI approved license to get on TheOpenCD. period. However, if a texture can be considered artwork, and not software, then you could try this: http://creativecommons.org/

[Darkmiss]

Personally im not a texture creator ( dont have the skill involved yet )
But if i did, I wouldn't care who did what with it.

Once I had put it up for download to a community such as this..
I wouldn't care how it was being used, and for what.

Lifes to short to care about things like that

Don I know you recently found someone from another program using your textures without any credit,
but this will always happen. Some people have no manners.

But its pointless trying to chase them down.

[selden]

As pointed out by Revent in another thread, all Celestia Addons, being derivative works of Celestia, are covered by the GPL. The use of (components of) Celestia Addons as parts of Orbiter Addons which are not themselves GPL'd would seem to be a violation of the GPL license. See the second sentence in paragraph 0 of the GPL, which is on the Web at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

(This is one of the reasons a lot of developers do not use the GPL or software which is GPL'd. They cannot afford to have their software made freely redistributable.)

[Harry]

As pointed out by Revent in another thread, all Celestia Addons, being derivative works of Celestia, are covered by the GPL.

Is this really true? IANAL, but I would not consider an addon a "derivative work" of celestia, as it itself does not use or incorporate parts of celestia. It may be useless without celestia, but that's not the point

I wish we wouldn't need licences...

[selden]

Harry,

I think you're right, and I was too easily persuaded to Revent's point of view by my inherent pessimism.

In the other thread, HankR wrote something similar to what you just did. As a result of his and your comments, my personal opinion is that Celestia Addons are programs or data which are interpreted by Celestia. Programs that are written in other GPL'd languages (e.g. g++ and Mumps) do not automatically inherit the GPL, so there's no reason that Celestia programs should, either. The databases used with MySQL, for example, which is a GPL'd software product, are not considered to be GPL'd, nor should the databases used by Celestia.

[Henrik]

Is this really true? IANAL, but I would not consider an addon a "derivative work" of celestia, as it itself does not use or incorporate parts of celestia. It may be useless without celestia, but that's not the point

1. Quote from the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. "

An add-on cannot be considered a separate work. It is designed specifically to work with Celestia. Paradoxically, the add-on authors might avoid going GPL (why?) if they retracted the Celestia version and released only an Orbiter version.

2. Read his story at GROKLAW: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 5135223118

In US copyright law (don't know about others), a derivative work is defiined as:

A ''derivative work'' is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ''derivative work''.

I guess an add-on would be considered an elaboration.

[selden]

Henrik,

I trust you realize that if you insist on such an interpretation, many Addons (most of mine, for example) will have to be withdrawn from public availability. As I pointed out earlier, many are derivative works based on images which are not and cannot become GPL'd.

[Henrik]

I trust you realize that if you insist on such an interpretation, many Addons (most of mine, for example) will have to be withdrawn from public availability. As I pointed out earlier, many are derivative works based on images which are not and cannot become GPL'd.

Hmm. Yes, sounds like a problem. Are the images acttually baked in to the binary? Could they be read in at runtime instead?

[Guest]

As far as "derivitive works" go, my feeling would be that textures (just being images) and models would not be covered (unless using one of the textures/models from the Celestia install as a start). The .dsc and other definition files might be, but the textures/models referenced by them probably not. No more than data contained in an GPL'd DB would be under GPL.

As to this "Celestia Community License", I find the "and a link to there website is given if they have one. " bit problematic. As we experienced recently with John's site. Web sites, particularly those owner entitys of add ons, change frequently. As such it is likely difficult for people trying to comply with the licence to do so.

I'd drop that bit altogether, though it perhaps could be reworded to be more reasonable. Perhaps it is by design to allow texture creators a somewhat easy means of revoking textures from people.

[selden]

Are the images acttually baked in to the binary? Could they be read in at runtime instead?

I don't know what "binary" you are referring to that they might be "baked into". All Addons used with Celestia are loaded at runtime.

[Henrik]

I don't know what "binary" you are referring to that they might be "baked into". All Addons used with Celestia are loaded at runtime.

The 3ds files seem to be in a binary format, ie. not text. (binary does not have to be executeable). AFAICS the images are included in these files.

[selden]

Whether or not a surface texture image is included within a 3DS model is up to its designer.

Many 3DS files that are used with Celestia only include the names of external image files that are to be applied to their surfaces. That means that any images can be used by just renaming them. Also, it's easy to edit most 3DS files so they specify entirely different image filenames. See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/billboard.html for one description of how that can be done: I use Emacs.

Celestia's SSC catalogs (parameter files) also provide for specifying surface texture images completely separately from the 3D model that's used to define the shape of a body.

[Don. Edwards]

Ok so it was a bad idea. So I retract the whole thing. I guess the only way to truly control what is being done with my work is to either stop releasing it, or start making people pay for them. I am not going to do anything like that at this point so I guess I will simply have to request that if someone wants to port my work over to another program or game that they let me know about it first. But in the end all I wanted was a simpler way to track what was being done with my work. What a mess.

Don. Edwards

[Harry]

1. Quote from the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. "

An add-on cannot be considered a separate work. It is designed specifically to work with Celestia.

I am still not convinced. A addon is pretty seperate: it doesn't use any part of celestia, it is not derived from celestia, many don't have any direct connection with celestia, except that they use the format of celestia's configuration-files, and can at least in part used independently.

Celestia is (not only) the program/the source. I can't see how an addon has anything to do with this. If your interpretation were true, I would expect a lot of problems for many OSS projects. My OpenOffice/Abiword/Whatever files too are very specific to the relevant program, but still they are only data. So are addons IMHO.

[Henrik]

Sorry to have caused all this confusion, but I'm finally starting to understand this stuff now. The fact that 3ds files are basically 3d-graphics files and that images can be kept outside makes things much easier. So, for each script or 3d-graphics file that is read in by Celestia, the copyright belongs to the add-on author. No problem. However, each author should still use a license to prevent slowly sliding into public domain (unless you don't mind). I suggest you consider one or more of these: http://creativecommons.org/license/ (this site also has very clear explanations of all this licensing stuff, a good read)

May I make a suggestion? The owner of a work can license it in many different ways at the same time. Using two licenses in combination might do what you want, without having to write your own special license.

1. This license would alow people to disribute it unchanged and at the same time charge money for that, like charging for a CD. But they could not change it and then sell the new version.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/1.0/

2. This one would alow people to cchange it, as long as it was not sold. When some onechooses to use your add-on under this license, then they can no longer use #1, because they have chosen one of them.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/

As a result of this combination someone could not include your work in modified form in a commercial game or an advert or something without your permission. If someone has made useful changes under license #2, he would need to contact the original author to combine the works again under license #1 before it could be sold by anyone. Under both 1 and 2, proper credit must be given.

What do you think?

[selden]

Don,

I don't think it's a bad idea, it's just that the details are cause for debate

I, at least, have come back to the conclusion that Addons are individually copyrighted by their authors. You can license their use in almost any way you want -- just include an appropriate document within the Zip files that you use to package them. "Appropriate" is the difficult point, if you really want it to be something that will hold up in court. I'd suggest visiting the creativecommons site mentioned earlier in the thread. Its forms seem to be able to provide appropriate wording for most of the obvious situations.

Unfortunately, some people will still steal your work without giving you any credit at all. If you want to be able to do something about that, you'll have to be able to provide evidence that it happened. Unobtrusive watermarks that won't get destroyed by simple image manipulations might be one way to do it.

Added slightly later:
Note that by "doing something about that" I don't mean to suggest that you'd actually have to take them to court. Publicising in appropriate places that it's happened probably would be enough to make it stop, at least for the most blatent ripoffs.