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

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)