Hi all, > There's no real reason why the GPL itself would not be suitable. In > fact, in most cases, it's what you actually want, because having the > prefered form of modification for the images and audio avaiable is the > best thing to help make minor changes and bug fixes to artwork and/or > audio. [It wouldn't be the first time that spelling errors, color > errors, mixing problems, et al. had to be fixed.] We've had a better look at the GPL and it does seem quite suitable. However, I'm not completely sure I'm reading it right, so allow me to share my interpretation.
As some background, the works we are licensing are graphics for a game. These are mostly created through 3D modeling. For this, mostly Blender files are rendered into the pcx bitmap format. These pcx files are sometimes manually post processed, and sometimes pcx files are created directly. Now, we are considering GPLv2, since the game itself is licensed as such. In GPLv2, section 3 is the "if you distribute binary, you must also distribute source" clause. However, this is worded such that it is only applicable when distributing the work in "object code or executable form". Since we're working with graphics, it is higly unlikely that this will ever be the case, so section 3 will not be applicable to our case normally. Is this indeed correct? This means that the source requirement is never applicable, and any derived work can be modified and distributed in any form freely, as long as the result is again GPL licensed. As far as I can see, this does allow people to take the blender "source" files, modify them and then distribute only the resulting pcx bitmaps, witholding the (modifie) blender "sources", right? So, in effect this means that using the GPL for our graphics will ensure that the graphics will stay free and available form modification, in whatever format the original authors supplied them. It will not prevent possible misuse of the graphics, but that is not a real problem (and somewhat harder to prevent, thouh GPLv3 might do a decent job). Gr. Matthijs
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