JWPlatt wrote:I didn't think so much about the license because there was none. I'm not really clear on what happens when no license or limitation is issued. I'm sure it's in copyright law somewhere. But what is the default state of code and copyright when any changes are all hypothetical (are not applied). It's not practical, as you say, but educational. Can we take a copyrighted paragraph from Harry Potter, pass it around, and see how aspiring authors can write it better? What if it's a teacher in a classroom? As long as it can't be implemented (e.g. sold), it seems like fan fic (or fan dev) to me and a simple practice repo could introduce a wider world to how things work.
I don’t know for sure either, but I am operating under the assumption that what copyright law grants us in the absence of a further license is very limited and doesn’t include publication of modified versions. I have never heard of copyright law making a difference for modifications that are “hypothetical”/“not applied”/“not implemented”. The only effect of that distinction I can see is on the likelihood of the copyright holder to sue you (and I think that is the context in which fan fic usually exists – technically infringing, but tolerated due to cost/benefit considerations). I believe the Harry Potter example would fall under “fair use” under US copyright law based on the criteria that it’s only a small excerpt of the whole work and that it’s for an educational purpose, but I’m unsure if this can be applied to our situation (determining what constitutes the “whole work” is difficult already). I think the easiest way of avoiding trouble before going forward with such a project would be to ask Cyan for their stance.
However, even assuming that your reasoning is correct and there is no problem in that regard, that still leaves my other point. I don’t see how we could realistically do development and test, review, and discuss changes, “simulating” the real process that is going to happen later on for learning purposes with any useful accuracy, without the ability to run the code. Once we have that ability, however, we have left the domain of “not applied” or “not implemented” changes and are squarely outside of what we are allowed to do without a license.
We have the very limited ability right now to run those parts of the code that are pure Python and don’t make any calls into Plasma. Contributions in these parts have been posted by
Pavitra on the MOUL forum. Others, like
OHB here, have posted untested changes. Perhaps you could try to get them on board?
The point of putting it into a repo and exercising changes upon it now is what you mention in your response to Nalates - learning and establishing how things work.
I agree with that goal, but I remain unconvinced that we have the prerequisites to put it into practice right now.
Nalates wrote:What I'm trying to get across, especially in the MOUL thread is a perception and actual process problem when we may have a large number of novices.
Then I guess what we ought to do is address that perception. How would we go about that?
Is it sufficient to have the development process out in the open, so that newcomers can get a feel of what it works like before participating, and try to maintain a welcoming and helpful atmosphere? I recall one such episode during the development of PyPRP 1.6.
Tikibear made a contribution, but wasn’t familiar with Subversion and unsure how to get it integrated. So we just walked him through it, and it all ended up well. I think the key part is encouraging people to jump right in, experiment, ask questions, and learn by trial-and-error, taking their fears of having insufficient knowledge of the processes or screwing up anything. Most who are genuinely interested are eager to learn and don’t need too much hand-holding once they step out of the initial intimidation.