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Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2010 4:50 am
by Sunoco
The Problem

It has been a bit of a pet peeve of mine, that the vast majority of Generally addons have not been properly licensed. What I mean, is that people make cars and tracks, and save for a select few, don't actually say what people can and cannot do with their tracks and cars. This has led to problems in the past. Sometimes people would leave the forum, and their works would be lost to history after one of the many forum crashes. Nobody knew if it was in the authors interest that their works be shared amongst the community if for some reason, they were available and/or the files had been lost. To prevent such confusion, you should license your work upon release.

What?

To license a work, is, in a nutshell, to tell others what they can and cannot do with your work. To license your work, you can do any number of things. You can simply say what people are allowed to do with your file in your post, or you can use a premade license.

How?

There are several ways you can license your work. One way, is to simple state what the terms are for using your work. Let us say that you wanted people to be able to freely share your work with one another, but not to modify it; you could simply state that in your post.

Example->

You: Download my track. You can share it with others, and use it how you like, but you may not modify it.

This works well, but sometimes it can get tedious, especially if you are not one for writing. It is possible that you might forget something, or you might not be clear enough. A simple remedy for this is to use a premade license. There are a plethora of licenses available to choose from, and it is very easy to apply them to your work.



List of Licenses

Restrictive-> You will have to state your terms yourself. Typically, restrictive licenses are themselves heavily copyrighted. No worry though, because as described above, this is an easy process, and rarely will you need a formal license. (especially considering that we are talking about Generally tracks! :lol: )

Free->
Creative Commons: My personal favorite. You can use their license generator to generate a license for your work based on your own preferences. Very cool.

Very Free->
Most Free Software Licenses belong in this category, especially BSD/Apache style licenses. These essentially allow people to do whatever they want with your work, as long as they give you credit and in the case of the GPL, you must share the source code if you share the compiled work.

Obviously, this is not necessarily applicable to Generally tracks and cars, considering that they don't really have "source code".

Public Domain-> Means that you relinquish all copyright and all claims, and that people are free to do whatever they want with you work, including modifying, taking credit, and redistributing your work.

I would personally recommend that you use a Creative Commons license. The CC licenses are not made especially for software (and in fact can license everything from pictures to recipes), and are more varied and customizable than the other choices. Below I have included an example of how to license something with a Creative Commons License.


Example:

Image

Click the image for the full license.

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:44 am
by Raska
Hi Sunoco,

The discussions are going on in the mods section about that matter (even the CC licenses), and the forum rules... In fact, as you all know :gr: is a freeware so we shouldn't really need to use a license.

We'll inform you soon (I hope) of the changes...

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:14 am
by Sunoco
Raska wrote:In fact, as you all know :gr: is a freeware so we shouldn't really need to use a license.
Just because the game is free doesn't mean that you shouldn't use a license. Just saying that the problems of track/car authorship could be fixed if more people did this. ;)

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 2:58 pm
by Alonsomania
Those people who ignore the "give credit/ask for permission part", wouldn't they ignore the license anyway?

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 3:15 pm
by thegreatfalcon
What the problem with those simple ReadMe that includes your e-mail and the permissions you give to people that download your add-ons??? This discussion shall actually go somekind of "Strange and Useless" thread I think...

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 3:59 pm
by Lukeno94
TGF, you've failed completely to realize what Sunoco is on about. This is NOT about usage in compos, but about future forum-moves or whatever. In no way is it useless, and an identical discussion has been going on in the mods section. Please read the entire thread before commenting in future.

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:07 pm
by Raska
Lukeno1 wrote:TGF, you've failed completely to realize what Sunoco is on about. This is NOT about usage in compos, but about future forum-moves or whatever. In no way is it useless, and an identical discussion has been going on in the mods section. Please read the entire thread before commenting in future.
TGF didn't talked about usage in compos... and I somewhere agree with him, why this thread should be in the tutorial section ?
Sunoco wrote:Just because the game is free doesn't mean that you shouldn't use a license.
That's not really our decision, but I'd see no good reasons to make it mandatory.
Sunoco wrote:Just saying that the problems of track/car authorship could be fixed if more people did this. ;)
Yes, as if more creators would make a readme file with their creation as TGF said...

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:28 pm
by Lukeno94
*Checks TGF's post again*

*Facepalms for idiocy/blindness*

My point still stands about this thread not being useless, however.

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:44 am
by 1nsane
Hmm, sorry... "bumping an old thread..." :p

But... In my opinion this kind of licensing for just some GR tracks and cars is a bit over the board. And to tell the truth, it wouldn't even work too well.
The main reason for this is, that you can't actually put the license IN the file itself. You can't code it in the .trk file, for example. You could write however long story to the readme, or perhaps even take a cute snapshot of the CC-license, but those files can still be removed. And if no one has those files anymore, no one knows the licenses anymore.
Just writing it in the forum post is an even worse idea. It's simply just "doing it wrong". If, IF this forum died for a reason XYZ, the licenses would be gone again.

These kind of licensing things work in places like deviantART simply because the place is not going to move anywhere, so the licensing won't vanish too easily either.

And still, not many people seem to respect these licenses too well in dA. I'm sure GR-community is generally smarter, but who knows what files are shared and modified without permissions in, say, smaller leagues, foreign forums, etc.

And yes, I like CC-license myself. I use it mostly in places like dA.

But let's just stick in the simple readme.txt in the track.zip for GR...

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 3:55 am
by Sunoco
Thanks for the replies, they are much appreciated. Anyway, I would like to say that I did say that you could go the simple disclaimer route. I described CC licensing because it really is useful information, and who knows if somebody would find it useful or not?

Also, a lot of cars and tracks did not come packaged with readme files, and the threads themselves typically didn't include any sort of license or disclaimer. I am not saying that it should be required, just that it is a good practice, and insures that people know what they can and cannot do, as far as common courtesy is concerned.

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:18 pm
by NICO1
This subject has been on my mind for some days now. As someone who works creatively also in job-life, as well as enjoying it privately, I still must say: It seems strange and an unneccesary hassle to license GR tracks. I dont mean to be rude, let me just explain in a short way, what I mean:

-GeneRally is a freeware game. The tracks and cars that can be created on top of it, cant be anything else than that: free. Even if someone would make stunning tracks and charge a dollar per track, it wouldnt be actually right to do so (even tho i think it would be cool). I just think you cant "own" a track, even if you created it all by yourself. Of course, you can let it be only on your hard-drive, so only you can use it, but from the moment you put it online and make it available to the community, its kind of really not in your hands anymore.

-On the other hand, I think its a nice gesture and a good sign for a healthy community to respect each others wishes about their creations and dont do something with it, that would be against the will of the creator. Alltough: Too many restrictions often only cause a lack of creativity.

-Last but not least: If someone thinks about starting a competition, it can be a boat load of communication before you get all the "OK's" to use the racetracks.

Just my 2 cents :taped:

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:32 pm
by Lukeno94
Everything, everywhere has some kind of license. Even open source things have licenses (that is the license).

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 7:03 pm
by Trigger Happy
@ NICO1: some articles of forum rules specially pay attention to the problem of competitions. Also you may be interested in this topic, which also handles some questions related to permissions/licences.

Re: Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco

Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 7:10 pm
by NICO1
Thank you for the information and the useful link Trigger Happy :bg: