License

License issues are important for Oolite.

Overview

Oolite is offered for free under the GNU General Public License version 2, with the data files (ship models, graphics etc.) dual licensed under both the GPL and the Creative Commons License.

The offering of the .oxp's is more murky!

Synopsis of the licenses used

Not too sure what to write here: want a useful synopsis of the various varieties

When one uploads a new OXZ to the in-game Expansions Manager, one is greeted by the following text:

A short summary of the license terms of the OXP (e.g. CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0). Note that since the purpose of this system is to allow players to download OXPs, using it requires you to grant a license to download and make copies for personal use, and that minimal permission will be assumed if this field is left blank.

The licenses which people seem to use the most are:

• CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 - Practically this means that you may rip it apart and use whatever seems useful to you, as long as you credit the original author.
• CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

The following have also been used:

• GNUstep public license (see RXSoftware
• WTFPL (see ClearHUD)

But see also Hotrods OXP, where Arexack_Heretic argues that the Oolite license covers the oxp's too. Certainly, a number of people back in the early days understood that uploading one's oxp's to either of the Oosat's meant that one was de facto licensing it.

Sung's Transporter

Sung's Thargoid

Sung's Coriolis

Historical Overview (Problems!)

Oosat 2

There are problems with unlicensed OXP's. With the collapse of Oosat 2 in 2006, the OXPs there were lost. When they were replaced, the ReadMe's which would have contained any licensing information were lost. There was also a general presumption held by some that any oxp's posted came under the same license as Oolite itself.

So a number of the early OXP's seem to have lacked licenses.

Sung affair

This issue was then compounded during the Sung affair. Sung Mehta, in Germany, produced some absolutely spiffing ship textures. Two things happened. His retextures were uploaded to the resurrected Oosat 2 with minor modifications to meet the data limits, and he got upset. He then wanted to use them elsewhere for financial gain. A number of the more militant members of the Friendliest Board This Side of Riedquat raised a big hoo-hah and he ended up removing his work from Oosat and leaving in a huff in early 2007.

Sorry for this, but the textures are not longer available. This work is to much annoyance for me. Good luck all bye Sung

((Feb 2007))

This led to lengthy discussions about licensing combined with various decisions being made by Ahruman and others.

Lestradae affair

Then there was the Lestradae affair, starting with Lestradae's creation of his mega-oxp, Realistic Shipyards. This was going to include everybody else's ship.oxp's and regularise them to make them compatible with each other and with Oolite as a whole. It became regarded as his "muscling in" by some of the other .oxp writers who then started insisting that he leave their oxp's out of his Realistic Shipyards! Again, matters escalated, and Lestradae ended up "resigning", so to speak, in Nov 2012. He argued that the real reason was the broken nature of his concept, but his reception by the then stalwarts of the community (who all seem to have since fled) could not have helped.

Links

• Analysis of Licenses (2014)
• Dizzy on Pleiadian's rewrite of a licenceless .oxp (2017)