[Kde-games-devel] Licensing for Gluon

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

Just going to split it up into two, the're sort of different discussions, and 
i don't want to derail the more pertinent one :)

On Wednesday 27 January 2010 17:08:06 Parker Coates wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:48, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen  wrote:
> > On Wednesday 27 January 2010 15:59:32 Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> >> Am Mittwoch, 27. Januar 2010 12:33:14 schrieb Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen:
> It's not just that GPLv3 is incompatible with the policy, but that
> it's incompatible with the actual licensing of the KDE libraries. (A
> small, but important distinction.)
> 
> Have you taken this to kde-licensing yet? They're the folks with the
> real know how in this area and they'll be aware of the loopholes and
> corner cases you're likely to hit.
> 
> Personally, I would think your options are LGPLv2+ or GPLv2+ for both
> GluonCore and GluonCreator.
> 
> >> > P.S.: The issue here does not include that of games created using
> >> > Gluon Creator: The reason for this is that they are irrelevant to
> >> > this, since they are content, and as such licensed independently.
> >> 
> >> The license choice for Gluon _can_ limit the license choice for apps
> >> using Gluon. For example, GPL libraries may only be linked by GPL
> >> applications, while LGPL libraries allow any license for linking
> >> applications.
> > 
> >  For this bit to make sense, i should probably need to explain what i
> > meant: Games created using Gluon Creator are not binaries, but rather a
> > collection of assets (some of which are scripts defining game logic).
> > What this means is that they are more a kind of document - so for
> > licensing purposes you're looking at something much closer to an odf
> > file (which is similarly an archive with some assets in it, making up a
> > document) rather than a program.
> 
> When such games are distributed, do they run inside GluonCreator or on
> top of GluonCore or on top of some other helper library?

  The games are played using one of the the as-of-yet un-created Gluon Player 
applications - there will be more than once because they'll need to be 
different on each of the targets (S60, Maemo and desktop will need different 
UI at least). You can view these as a kind of Steam or Impulse client, a sort 
of launcher/community hybrid type thing. There's a lot more about the visions 
for it in the Gluon Vision document over on the wiki: 
http://gluon.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Gluon_Vision

-- 
..Dan // Leinir..
http://leinir.dk/

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