Status Report From the Open Source Games Community

qubodup writes "Free Gamer, an open source gaming blog, has recently become the center of open source artists, developers and gamers. In its forums, the GPU-hungry Classical Java RPG and the Neverball-killer irrlamb have found their second home. So did sub-communities like extremist free gamers, who insist on games not only be free software but also to contain free content and want to build a knowledge base of existing free games. There are also free content artists, which address an old problem of open source games and want to supply graphics and sound for projects in need of game media."

Incompatibility between CC and GNU licenses

[tepples]

If I develop a game, and I want to distribute it under a copyleft license, what license should I use? Due to the lack of a native file system implementation on some platforms, the code and its related assets (graphics, sound, maps, etc.) must be combined into one executable file, but the GNU licenses appear to require that a single executable file be distributed under a single license. Licenses based on the Creative Commons Attribution License ("CC-BY") are not intended for software; instead, Creative Commons recommends GNU licenses for software. However, the GNU software licenses are not compatible with any of the Creative Commons licenses. Section 4(a) of the Creative Commons Attribution License versions 2.5 and 3.0 allow a contributor to require that downstream distributors remove the contributor's copyright notice, but the GNU licenses do not allow the removal of copyright notices. Is there a way to solve this without having to track down every single artist on Wikimedia Commons individually and ask them for waivers of this requirement?

Re:Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits

[qubodup]

On the Free Gamer forums there is a "FOSS games targetting users with lower end hardware?" discussion and one of the members insisted that games have crappy art/gfx/snd because the dev-tools suck.. Sorry sofar, I'm pretty clueless, and don't understand: do you want library independence or, the contrary + the game written in high-level? Which tools *do* you want for a game development?