Re: Sponsor request for 'Open Surge'

Bruno Kleinert <[email protected]> Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:22:38 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.games
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Am Mittwoch, dem 30.12.2020 um 01:01 -0300 schrieb Carlos Donizete
Froes:
> Hi Bruno,
> 
> > Unfortunately, I found a blocker from uploading the package: The licensing and
> > copyright information of the game's data is missing in debian/copyright. I
> > added debian/TODO to document that issue, i.e., there's still quite some work
> > ahead to gather the respective copyright holders and licenses for data files.
> > I picked random samples and it seems that some graphics files have that
> > information in the image, while for the audio and music files copyright
> > holders and license is mostly unclear. Please get in touch with upstream to
> > get this sorted out!
> 
> Sorry, but I didn't understand what you need and what needs to be corrected to
> have all this work and mandatory part in the licenses, since the upstream itself
> declares in the main project directory that the license is GPLv3.

If upstream includes a piece of work which has a license that forbids
re-licensing, e.g., images/hydra.png is CC-BY-SA-3.0, then upstream has
no permission to re-license it under GPL-3. I'm not a lawyer, but would
expect this could only work if upstream has a written exception
permission by the original author to re-license a piece of work. Since
there is no permission released with Open Surge, we cannot assume this
permission exists.

> 
> Is it really necessary to ask upstream to add all licenses to files such as
> audio, music and images that it has created and that declares GPLv3?

Yes, because Debian must make sure it does not redistribute work that
was pirated by upstream.

It seems there's even such an example in Open Surge:

fuddl@flutschi:~/debian/opensurge/opensurge/musics$ ogginfo theme.ogg 
Processing file "theme.ogg"...
[…]
TITLE=Minds wide open
ARTIST=Johan Brodd
[…]

I searched the web for that song and found it on
vimeo: https://vimeo.com/80347147

The license information provided there states: Atrribution, Non-
commercial, no derivates. Those conditions disqualify it to go into
Debian's 'main' section. Without permission, even upstream has no
permission to re-license that file under GPL-3 and we need
clarification what's going on here.

For the moment and the Debianizing work, this means all such files with
unclear license must be removed from the package or better be replaced
and replacements should be offered to upstream.

> 
> There is no way to inform this in the debian directory itself, otherwise, more
> details of what is happening and what is missing would be necessary for me to
> forward to the project developer.

I apologize that I was wrong in some cases, e.g., some creative common
licenses permit re-licensing, so to some (but not all) files, the GPL-3
applies. I pushed corrections to my original mess :)

However, there are still files included in Open Surge for which it is
unclear if upstream has the permission to redistribute or re-license
them.

> 
> Thanks in advance for your help. Happy 2021!
> 

You're welcome. From what I've seen in Open Surge it seems this is
another example of upstream copying random files from the web and
pretend to have the permission to create derivate works from them and
redistribute them. If upstream doesn't have that permission, Debian
doesn't either. That's why this must be sorted out with upstream before
I can upload the package.

Cheers,
Bruno
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