Celestia Forums

First post here, but boy do I need help on this one...

I have a question concerning the use of Celestia, not the source code itself but images generated by the program:

Someone asked me if it were possible to motion capture a flyby in Celesta for use in a television program or movie. This person claimed that the output is covered under GNU and can be re-used elsewhere, in a non-static application (that is, the output is read-only/watch-only, not interactive), but there's some concern that this may be a big stretch for interpreting GNU.

I wanted to get an answer back to this person before he made a horrible mistake. I could use any help available out there.


Jim

Jim-Ryan wrote:First post here, but boy do I need help on this one...

I have a question concerning the use of Celestia, not the source code itself but images generated by the program:

Someone asked me if it were possible to motion capture a flyby in Celesta for use in a television program or movie. This person claimed that the output is covered under GNU and can be re-used elsewhere, in a non-static application (that is, the output is read-only/watch-only, not interactive), but there's some concern that this may be a big stretch for interpreting GNU.

I wanted to get an answer back to this person before he made a horrible mistake. I could use any help available out there.

I don't believe that this is an accurate interpretation of the GNU License. In any event, I'm the original developer of Celestia and have no problems with people using output of Celestia in movies and television programs. You are not the first person to ask about this--other people have been using Celestia to create video and images for broadcast for some years. If you are creating videos that show add-ons beyond those in the standard Celestia package, you should contact the authors of those add-ons for permission. Also, adding a credit for Celestia and the Celestia Development Team is not a requirement, but it is greatly appreciated.

--Chris

Content that you create with a program which is made to produce that sort of content as output does not belong anymore to the program,
but to the person who creates the output. It is NOT covered anymore under the GPL.
The content that the user creates, in this case movies or/and pictures, are output of the program.
It's no longer covered by the GPL of that program and completelly free of the GPL of that program.


That means that captured movies (with the default celestia program without addons) are the property of the person who has shot them in celestia and that person can license that content like he or she wants.

Be carefull with addons that can be differently licensed.
But most of the time people don't have a problem with using addons for all sorts of purposes.
(The addons on the motherload are uploaded by the author themselve so everybody could use them)