Content Licensing

[Deledrius]

Indeed, just a friendly reminder for him to remind them, if he hasn't already. I figure it's just as easy for it to slip his mind as anyone else's.

[Hoikas]

Funny how these things work... I figure we'll get our "no" from our usual friends of Cyan, who seem to have access to the very things which we desire to actually accomplish useful work.

[janaba]

Rand's answer at the Q&A session within the ADBMM and Cavern Mysterium today to
Christian's (and my) question for any progress or update on the 'Content Licensing Proposals' ...

Spoiler

[Mac_Fife]

We've had an initial response from Cyan Since this is "fresh" (although sparse) information I was able to bring it up at yesterday's AGM, so many of you will already be aware of this.

There is no real "substance" or detail given yet that we can pass on but here are the things we are able to relay (my own interpretations and comments are in green):

• Cyan has read the Community Licensing Request and likes the idea and feels it is "ready to proceed down a path which would license certain assets". I note the use of the phrase "certain assets", but for now can only speculate that may mean a limited trial to see how things go, but it could also mean they are constrained on what they can license.
• A proviso on that is that the assets will be made available for community development of MOUL, and things like porting to other engines, or commercial (for profit) use will not be allowed.
• Cyan also wishes to make it clear that in licensing any assets, it is not abandoning its rights to those assets or otherwise placing them in the public domain. While Cyan wishes to make it clear that it retains copyright on the original assets, it doesn't want to extend that to unfairly claiming ownership of any derivative work. I'd infer that means that derivative works could have thier own license (and certainly copyright), so long as Cyan's original copyright and license are acknowledged.
• Associated with the previous item, Cyan wishes to maintain a list/register of developers using the licensed Cyan assets. In effect, this seems to be a desire to assign usage rights to individual licensees rather than declaring an "open house". I don't think it's really an attempt to restrict who can use the assets so much as reinforcing the point that the assets are "licensed by Cyan". There is no information on the mechanics of this yet.

Clearly, no actual license has yet been established, so there's not a lot more we can interpret for now, and I suspect Cyan are still trying to bottom out exactly what they need from any content license (e.g. in terms of protections and so on). But at least we now know that they are in favour of giving access to at least some assets.

A small step, but a step in the right direction.

[Deledrius]

Hopefully the localization files can get a simple permissive license so that it isn't held up by the more complicated custom art assets considerations and registration system, allowing us to get started.

Also, a nice simple data distribution license would really be useful for the shards right now, and doesn't need to be complicated or give up any of their rights.

If either of these can be fast-tracked, it would be immensely useful and build some good faith in the rest of the process as well.


Are they inviting the dialog we requested? Should we present a break down of different assets and suggested licenses that the community will need to be able to accomplish our stewardship of Uru in Cyan's continued absence?

I'd prefer to avoid the unfortunate situation their silence during the source code considerations led to in regards to improper and incomplete licensing, as that wastes everyone's time and effort.

[Mac_Fife]

Also, a nice simple data distribution license would really be useful for the shards right now, and doesn't need to be complicated or give up any of their rights.

Personally, I'd like to think that would be possible too. One thing that crosses my mind though, is that for everyone's sanity we probably want to avoid having a different license for every use case, but I can see lots of ways that things can quickly get complicated.

At this point we don't actually know what Cyan is prepared to license, so whether either of those "fast-tracks" is possible is anyone's guess right now. I guess that suggestions will be welcome (particularly if they point to license templates that will fill Cyan's needs), but I think we have to recognise that this is always going to be a "spare time" exercise on Cyan's part, so I'd still expect "fast" to be a relative term.

Speculating, I'd hypothesize that Cyan's initial thinking on this subject might well be primarily considering the "fixing what's broken in MOULa" use case, rather than creating new ages, etc., or the "use without modification" use case that most shards are looking for.

[Deledrius]

After re-reading part of this thread, and of course just general observations over the years, I have to ask. I really just have to say it:

Why is Cyan absolutely, completely, fundamentally incapable of participating in a dialog over anything?

Yes, I realize a couple of you OU folks actually get to talk to them relatively candidly on occasion, and yet I still get the impression that while they're personable enough (which has been my experience in correspondence as well), they rarely ever discuss the actual details of anything.

I simply cannot comprehend why it is so impossible to get them to discuss anything with us, leaving us instead to break everything down into yes or no questions we can feed into a little black box to get single-word answers with no context or explanation, or else wait millennia for an answer we inevitably cannot use? It is so incredibly frustrating, ineffective, and frankly damaging.

I want to make this constructive, I want to ask what we can all do to make this work better, but ironically that would require hearing from Cyan and discussing the matter with them. It's not a problem primarily on our end; there's nothing we can do about their inability to communicate, so I guess this is just a post of frustration.

[Mac_Fife]

I can only guess at the answer but I think the fundamental issue is "time" (or rather lack thereof). That and the fact than probably none of the key figures in this issue are co-located anymore making even internal dialogue a bigger issue than just having a chat round the water cooler.

No matter how much importance any of us place on Uru/MOUL we have to acknowledge that Cyan is a business and none of this is revenue generating, so it's always going to be a spare time activity, and in a way if they're working effectively they shouldn't have much spare time. Tony spoke of "having found a productive moment" to review the community proposal - I guess that's going to be typical. Getting involved in a dialogue means making something of a commitment to schedule time to correspond within some sort of reasonable time scale, and I suspect that's hard for Cyan to do.

Licensing is probably a particularly difficult issue since I think only Tony is in a position to speak with any authority on the subject: Rand may have the vision on what Cyan would like to do and provide the general direction, but Tony has to make sure that the business and legal interests are covered. That's my reading on things anyway.

[Deledrius]

Very true.

It's just hard putting in so much time for something when they see it as literally the least important thing to spend time on, especially when they still hold most of the cards.

Still, none of that excuses the lack of discussion. As they say, talk is cheap, yet we don't even rate that high.

[JWPlatt]

The ball is mostly in my court at the moment on this issue after some work that Mac_Fife completed. The ball is bouncing all over the place and hard to catch up to. I have to compile some points and discussion and make it concise so that it's more likely to fit into a "productive moment" and get attention. OS developers could think of time and schedule as an analog for memory fragmentation and page faults, how long it takes to read and consider as code size, and memory resources as a function of the current economy.