I was replying earlier but I’ve been taken offline for the last ~4 hours due to a powercut.
Eating dinner to the light of an LED lantern was interesting, but hopefully it won’t happen again.
I’ll say what I have to say anyway and leave it at that.
I only brought up NC because @adekto mentioned corporations.
I’m half and half on NC.
On the down side it stops fans of the game from e.g. going to a T-shirt printer to get a design printed on a T-shirt for them to wear.
Without the NC clause, they’d be free to do that.
On the other hand, it stops a big corporate T-shirt company from monopolising on the game’s popularity and printing loads of T-shirts using the game’s characters.
Without the NC clause, they’d be free to do that,
all above board and nobody could say otherwise.
The reason I tend to err towards the NC clause is as thus:
Essentially I don’t like the idea that we could spend weeks putting effort into this only for someone to come along, port it to Android, stick that port on the Android store and start profiting from doing so.
I’d rather ban everyone (but the creators) from profitting from the game.
The exact definition of ‘commercial use’ isn’t clear cut, but I can’t imagine a sensible court would rule something like handing out free badges or free T-shirts as a commercial purpose unless someone was doing it specifically to promote a business that they run.
Anyone who did want to use them for promotional purposes could ask permission, or there could even be a clarification on the readme saying “graphics are explicitly free for use by businesses as long as said business is not profiting from the use of said graphics”.
Such a clear-cut public declaration would be hard to argue against in court.
That’s fine by me.
Perhaps the best approach would be to have a separate art file for CC0 art and have that art duplicated in the main graphics area under CC BY-SA.
It might be a bit confusing, but we could stick an explanation in the readme.
Either that or just don’t provide the CC0 stuff under CC0 in the repo, which would completely eliminate the confusion.
It could always be hosted in a separate repo with an explanation as to why it’s there.
I’d advise being as specific as possible in the documentation.
Even if the in-game credits are shortened, the graphics themselves should have their details documented.
E.g. for every image.png have a corresponding image.txt that specifies all the details about it - the person who had the idea, the person who did the art, the person who named it etc.
Hopefully in most cases that will all be one person so it will be simple, in other cases it will be more difficult.
I know it’s a hassle, but it’s also an opportunity because not many games document things that finely.
Have you ever wondered who designed a specific Pokemon, and how many people it actually takes to fill in all the information for a specific Pokemon?
I know for a fact that others have, so having that information publicly available will generate interest (hopefully).
We could even do stuff like gather together to pool monster ideas, then one of us does the concept art, then another person creates the in-game sprite.
The art encoded in code files could probably follow a slightly more relaxed form and just state who contributed to the actual art.
I’ll have to sort it tomorrow because it’s a bit late to be fiddling with GitHub.
Besides which, we need to decide how to tackle it.
Should we put all the CC0 stuff in a separate file, or a separate repo, or somehow state it’s dual-licenced?
Technically that’s true, but it’s also possible to stop distributing it.
There’s nothing in any licence that requires someone to keep a file available to the public.
Part of me is thinking we should start off with simpler art (e.g. GameBoy Colour style graphics) and then add detail later.
It’s easier to refine art further down the line than to remove detail.
Just a thought.
