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Freedom Issue #3245

[frogatto][frogatto-data] Tracking issue

gap - almost 2 years ago - . Updated almost 2 years ago.

Status:
fixed
Priority:
bug
Assignee:
% Done:

0%


Description

It is such a shame that these two packages are blacklisted; the former would be okay if it were not for the latter, which is under a license which is closer than most to being free.
I hope we could convince the developers to liberate the data.

History

#1

Updated by gap almost 2 years ago

The blacklist can now reference this issue.

#2

Updated by bill-auger almost 2 years ago

  • Assignee set to bill-auger
  • Status changed from unconfirmed to confirmed

i added the reference but there is little information on this ticket - which non-free license is it? - is it a common one? - if not, what about it makes it non-free?

#3

Updated by bill-auger almost 2 years ago

  • Status changed from confirmed to fixed
#4

Updated by gap almost 2 years ago

I apologise because I made a mistake; my initial report is inaccurate.
I seemed to recall checking out the repo a long time ago and misremembered it having a CC-BY-NC license (thus "more free than most"), although it turns out I mixed it up with another game.

There actually is no license on much of the game; it's "all rights reserved" copyrighted

from https://github.com/frogatto/frogatto/blob/master/LICENSE:

Frogatto's files are separated into two licenses; with the exception of a few specific directories, everything is licensed under the CC-BY 3.0 LICENSE ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ ).

The following directories are exempt from this, and all of their contents are copyrighted to the frogatto team.
- data/levels, which contains all of our level files
- images/characters, which contains all of our main-character art
- images/tiles, which contains our tile art
- sounds, which contains our sound effects
- music, which contains our background music

Any format-conversions of our audio files, such as the files in music_aac and sounds_wav, are also copyrighted.

Frogatto’s story, and all visual designs of characters (in any representation) and names of characters within the game are copyrighted.

The source code to the game -- limited to the C++ source code files found in the "src" directory of the Anura engine -- is also available for license under the Zlib license. See the LICENSE file in that directory for the details of the license.

As you can see, the devs deliberately made the critical game data proprietary.

This situation is confirmed in the following issues:
- https://github.com/frogatto/frogatto/issues/148
- https://github.com/frogatto/frogatto/issues/400

It also looks like someone asked them to liberate the data but was largely ignored:
https://github.com/frogatto/frogatto/issues/462

Moreover, the Frogatto PKGBUILD references an Ubuntu font, and IIRC, the Ubuntu fonts are proprietary:
https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/frogatto/trunk/PKGBUILD#L52
ln -s /usr/share/fonts/TTF/UbuntuMono-R.ttf "$pkgdir"/opt/frogatto/

#5

Updated by bill-auger almost 2 years ago

excellent work - ideally, all blacklist entries would have such a detailed reference - i have tried to do so myself, one by one, as the need to review them arises

It also looks like someone asked them to liberate the data but was largely ignored:

whether the request was ignored or taken favorably, it is unlikely to happen for many games, if there was no concern to make it fully libre from the beginning; because it would require almost all art and sounds to be re-made - it may be entirely different people who are maintaining the game today; and the request is simply not realistic - they would not have permission to re-license, and may not even know who does

games that are intended to be fully libre from the beginning, find it difficult to find artists willing to contribute - i think that is why there are so few of them

the usual way a game becomes liberated, is when the game was originally entirely proprietary, then some years later it was freed by the original authors - sometime the art is not freed and sometimes it is; but in these cases, it can be done all at once, because there is a single copyright holder

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