Originally, this subject was rolled in with the more general subject of a "Content License", but I think this is case that can stand entirely on it's own and for that reason I've broken this out from the main Content License thread.
One of the main considerations here is "what" is to be licensed: To service the need to be able to redistribute Cyan's content, we're looking at the stuff that goes in the "dat", "avi" and "sfx" folders. We don't need all the original "source" files that were used to create these folders, just the contents themselves, so that is immediately different to what we hope to cover with a Content License. Also, thinking about "how" it will be used, for the purpose of purely redistributing the content we don't need a license that allows modification of the files - that could come as part of a Content License at a later date.
Putting these things together with the little snippets we have (from the other thread) on Cyan's general view of content licensing, we could surmise that a Redistribution License, from Cyan's perspective, should:
- Assert Cyan's property on the licensed material,
- Restrict the ability for third parties to profit from the licensed material,
- Permit redistribution of the licensed materials in an unmodified form,
- Require that any redistribution passes on the same license terms
- Restrict the licensed materials to be used only in conjunctions with MOULa/CWE and direct derivatives.
What I'd like to suggest to Cyan is that they consider whether a license such as the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) (by way of an example) could be adopted as a Redistribution License for the MOULa content. With something that has an established legal code it may be easier for Cyan to see the implications than it would be for a custom license.
The above describes a fairly restrictive license, but I think that's what Cyan are looking for. In any case, there's nothing to prevent them relicensing under more relaxed terms at a later date if that seems appropriate (and it's much easier to relax a license than it is to tighten one up).
As is noted in the top post for the Content Licensing - Rebooted! thread, there are some items that need to be excluded from a Redistribution License due to their own licensing restrictions. That's a pain but hopefully it'll be a relatively small number, and will be files that can relatively easily be substituted with alternatives by the shard operator.
There may be reasons that Cyan might push back against a suggestion like this, but are there any immediate problems that we'd see with doing something like this?