The heart of Sauerbraten, its source-code, and quite some of its textures, maps and Ironsnouts are already under free licenses. This means you can freely share and change them.

A lot of the remaining game media is still but only a small leap away from being free. Many of its custom licenses have good intentions in mind but an overall missing standard is keeping things rather messy and preventing Sauer from entering a large audience through the biggest Linux repositories (debian, Fedora, Ubuntu main, etc), auto-updates, new media-coverage and being -just like its heart- entirely open source...

The idea that has been dwelling in many of us for quite some time now is to give our favorite game back something that it really deserves, that is so special and unique to its nature: to set it free by its own community.

An idea would be to rally helpers to ask old content creators to relicense their works under FSF/OSI & DFSG approved licenses like zlib, new BSD, MIT X, GPL, LGPL, CC0, Artistic 2.0 ... maybe cc-by-sa 4.0? replace map/textures things we can't acquire by new or relicensed content; get new content; the fragging community could vote what maps they want; a better filetree structure like /packages/textures/creator instead of /packages/creator/... might clear things up...

But this months poll is meant as your opinion poll. To gather helpers, ideas and to work out how we could make things happen (alas, the competition did it before :D) and what we could improve on our way. Therefore, I suggest the following "ROAR"

Roadmap Of Awesome Refurbishment:

1. Collect opinions, ideas & good will throughout this poll <<- we are here

2. Approach developers with mortal prayers

3. if $blessing_by_devs [looplist i (listclients) [distribute masterplan among helpers]] [cancelsel]

4. Profit & Immortality! :D

UGH!

(unfreequently gasped hesitations)

1. It's already free YOU FOOL! -.-
Yes, but it's also free. =P

2. Open source will never be as popular.
While this may not always be the case, the question remains: Do we need to be popular?

3. Why not fork sauerbraten?
As we know today, a mouth-watering sauerbraten can only be achieved by its main ingredients. Without our heroes, our quest would be pretty much tasteless.
However: if they would be uncertain by the end of this poll, but willing to give it a shot, we could open a temporary github and see how far we can get.

4. The goal of the sauerbraten project is not about being anal with licensing
Free Software does not always need to be copyleft. In fact, given our very kind and permissive heart, we could consider asking only for fsf/osi/dfsg/gpl-compliant licenses that give everyone a maximum amount of liberty (zlib, new bsd, artistic 2.0, cc0, mit x, etc...)

5. Who wants to work for free? Are you crazy?! -.-
Yes, but that's not the point. -.- While working for free may currently seem to be a tad outdated, a good argument for every artist and helper could be getting your name and skill out there, to a vast audience. ;D

6. It is hard to get people away from their state of the art console games
Almost. :D But with Tesseract around the corner, we could try speeding Sauer up again to not only win our justice players back...

Almost. :D But with Tesseract around the corner, we could try speeding Sauer up again to not only win our justice players back...
You don't even know what the current goal of Sauerbraten is, so how the heck you think it would be involved with Tesseract?

Well, I kinda caught that up somewhere and just wanted to restate one thing it was not about. But it could be a bit misleading and too cocky, in that case I'd like to apologize.

So what's it all about?

One of the connections to Tesseract are it's creators. And by eihruls interview Tes. seems to be sort of a “what if”-universe.

As it clearly aims at faster hardware and a lot of people are already complaining about low fps in Sauer, an idea would be to get back to our strengths:
make it smaller and more agile again, an alternative to high-end hardware games. It can still look very pretty on a netbook!

Read the article another time as Eihrul certainly isn't planning to improve rendering (thus framerate). This is also off-topic with the question of the poll.

So stop complaigning and start your own fork on Sauerbraten! Perhaps Quadropolis supports it one day.

Suicizer, can you please move this subthread so I can update the UGH?

The wut?

No way. we'll keep it here so we have all in one page. very useful cuz you always quote your UGHs

Can you please remove the 5th option again that I did not write, penguin? And the game content is freeware, not free software (that you're allowed to change and use in a much freer manner)

That was me adding it, and by the looks of it some people agree :P

Sauerbraten is open source (regardless of external libraries like SDL) and also free in itself, that does not include some of the content it comes with which in the least specify that they are free to be distributed with this game and personally used. So technically it's completely free, and what you're proposing will likely not work, according to your R.O.A.R.

1) So far so good.
2) Instead of bothering eihrul with your prayers why not fork sauerbraten? Expecting him to give you commit access to change the repository in accordance to your cause is madness.
3) cancelsel
4) The good die young.

So yea, start by forking sauerbraten and work your way up instead of down. You'll bother less important people and you'll have free reign over the project that you so much desire to get underway.

Cube 2 Forum, subject's pretty much been shot down every time it's been brought up.
До свидания и Спасибо
-P

GPL license is not free as much as Apache2. GPL is viral slavery forever, and thinking big corporations will make their code free instead of just reinventing their own wheel or getting something bsd/apache/mit-licensed is pure naivety.
And calling licenses with restrictions, like GPL, more free than total-freedom licenses is obviously illogical. It's the same proprietary idea, only now "for the freedom!"-proprietary.

Sir IronSnout X10K himself is CC-BY 3.0. :D
 But some of the content is CC-BY-NC (which is deemed non-free by all major fs organizations) or of custom, not acknowledged licenses. If you stroll through the folders of Sauerbraten/packages/ there is usually a license.txt by the author.

Keeping it GPL-compliant, but BSD-style (see UGH 4), from what I understand now, could be our way into pretty much all repositories out there, including Apples Mac App Store, you name it... :D

This rises a good point for having a "one-for-all" license overall the whole sauerbraten pack, the distribution via third part stores/reps.

BUT, let's take a few minutes to think.

What stores/reps can we aim at?
Does them really guarantee an audience increase?
Does them reach the kind of audience we should reach? [our target]

And, most of all, is it right to ask the devs to share their work in BSD style so that anyone can pick it up and SELL it instead of sharing it again for free? BSD says that the code is open source and can be used by others who can even sell it, while GPL asks to get it always back to GPL, so it's Open Source for Open Source.

So cat, you raised it, you gotta work now! Go seek for all the stores/file reps you can find, starting from the major's oc, and give us some more info about how they handle the licenses.
Don't just give links! we don't have the time to read all those stuffs. Write sum-ups pls.

What stores/reps can we aim at?
About all stores, if it's BSD-style.

Does them really guarantee an audience increase?
well, it won't DEcrease the audience =P
Ubuntu alone is used by about 20 million people as of now, Sauer on the front page of the software center, you do the math...

Does them reach the kind of audience we should reach? [our target]
What is our target? Quadropolis-Admins? -.-

most of all, is it right to ask the devs to share their work in BSD style
zlib is already BSD style.

while GPL asks to get it always back to GPL, so it's Open Source for Open Source.
please see UGH 4/5.

Please READ what was already explained in depth, I can not do more than give you the insight I've researched. If I'm wrong with something, please correct me.

why iggy, im sorry I went a bit snappy back there =/ all this attitude is getting to me; my own either =P
Ofc I'm very glad for you and everyone helping and questioning.

I suggest we open an Etherpad the next days, where we could add skiings list (thanks again!) / a whitelist and structure our tasks, ideas & web-references for how-to make it happen and to clear up all remaining questions - the result can go back in here.
I'll have a first draft ready by then, that everyone can edit (reasonably, ofc -.- :D)

I'd really suggest you to take action instead of opening something else.
You have already opened, questioned and talked enought.
What you need to do is contact all the ppl who made the contents and aske them to re-license their work and go to ask our dev on #irc if he'd like to re-license the whole project, giving him very valuable reasons.

The best point to you could [or not] be this thing of stores and reps. Other things you brought here are kinda pointless, so don't talk more and do the task I've asked you [third time]

you should probably instead prepare a standard email to be sent to those owning the content.

btw: i already refuse.

That was from a specific incident where someone on the dev team of Red Eclipse was pressuring Quin to make changes he didn't want to make, and they ended up leaving angrily. I'm not sure about what the issue in particular was, but I'd say the essay is more a PSA about the dangers of being too posessive of someone else's project.

Anyway it matters. Quinn is right to me: Open Source is a democracy of one.

While I'm always striving to uphold a strict dictatorship of one on our maps, the outcome of those so eager to please me is hardly ever what I have asked for.... o.O ......but as I came accustomed to the inevitable, I got to see how the beauty of the product, in the end, is so much more than it's rewards.

For further reading on this subtopic, I'd like to point out a small book that is said to have had a fair impact on spawning mozilla/firefox.

So since when is Sauerbraten just like a web-browser?

I'll quote some phrase from the article of your link:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
Perhaps you should find the itch first instead of scratching beforehand.

My dear Suicizer, I believe you should go into yourself and onto a journey to find YOUR ITCH for once. =)

You are scratching the wrong guy as I'm not a developer. You know I'm not a developer, don't be a troll of your own poll.

About the cathedral vs. bazaar thing, SVN is sort of a "bazaar". A very quiet bazaar where almost all the fruit sellers are old veterans who know the slightly antiquated business regulations of their seaside palace plaza inside out, but still technically a bazaar.

Isn't Sauerbraten someone else's project?

it is, so this poll is dumb.

That's the whole point of making it open-source, so that forking can be possible without having to remake all the assets from scratch.

So instead of saying "EIHRUL YOU NEED TO ADD THIS FEATURE" we can do it ourselves.

Though I guess the point of Quin's message wasn't just "stop telling me how run my game" but also about the importance of getting to know the community and their goals. Forking puts less pressure on the devs, but there's definitely wrong ways to fork:

not giving credit to the creators,
not being helpful to the original creators if they want to use features from your fork,
having badly documented, messy code so that using your features is impossible anyway,
trying to advertise to people in the community to move over to your version after all the work they've done,
trying to advertise your fork in general, since the main reason it exists is as a test for new features, unless the premise of your fork is so different from the original that it warrants an entirely new game
etc.

But if you do it right, forking can be beneficial for everyone without being burdensome to anyone.

The game is freeware, you may freely distribute the archive and/or installer unmodified on any media. You may re-compress using different archival formats suitable for your OS (i.e. zip/tgz/rpm/deb/dmg), any changes beyond that require explicit permission from the developers.

You may play Cube 2: Sauerbraten for any purpose as long as you don't blame the authors for any damages incurred.

If you want to produce new content with the Cube 2 Engine, you have to be aware that the source code may be Open Source, but the game and the media it consist of have their individual licenses and copyrights. This means that you have roughly 3 options:

1. You may produce new content for the "Sauerbraten" game, for example as a custom map (.ogz/.cfg/textures etc). Contributing content to the original game is most welcome, and the most productive way of working with the community.
2. If you want to create your own gameplay beyond what you can do with a map, the best way to do this is as a "mod" (same as above, but with new executable that incorporates your gameplay), that requires an existing install, and installs only the new files you created in parallel to the existing files.
3. If you insist on making a standalone game based on Cube 2, do realize that only the sourcecode is yours to use freely (if you abide by the ZLIB license, see below), while the media is not. You can't simply redistribute the entire package with your modified files, as the majority of game media is not yours to use freely (it is made by many authors with a variety of licences and copyright restrictions). Unless you have explicit permission from the authors, or the readme says explicitly "may be used for any purpose" or similar language, it will be illegal to include in your standalone game based on the engine (you may not assume that just because a file has no explicit license, that it is free of copyright). Therefore, if you wish to produce a standalone game, be prepared to make many of the maps, models, textures, sounds etc from scratch yourself.

In this sense Cube 2: Sauerbraten is similar to games like Quake (its code is Open Source, but its media is not), it is a game that is meant to be added to, not copied and used as a template. Sauerbraten is not meant to be a quick game creation kit, it is a game.

If you wish to use the source code (ZLIB license) in any way, read the src/readme_source.txt file carefully.

From our beloved game's readme, to who are asking "wtf are this ppl blablabling about"?

Anyway you can add a feature if you feel the need; just do it and post it here as a mod. If it works properly, it is really usefull to most of the players and really adds something wich was missing then our beloved dev could add it in the next release.

want to collaborate with Sauerbraten? no problem sir, you're welcome, have a try and let us know!
and it is always been like that.

I've been activating 11 accounts since this poll exists (although only 6 of them actually logged in). That might be the reason....

Don't worry about it, just rely on the theory described on 'How Not To Start A Mod'. Only 1% of the currently 26 people would be qualified to do it right while willing to help as well.

lolz ya for some reason its a hot topic, you got atleast 5 or 6 users i nv see post replies on this node... idk why maybe everyone wants to help ;p or they think they do till they have to do the work :0

chasester

Dear skiing, suicizer, RaZgRiZ and everyone against this idea. I'm glad that you try to participate, but repetitive nay-saying doesn't get us anywhere.

In fact, from what I was told, people are even scared to post here, because of this bad attitude.

I ask you to please give good reasons why we shouldn't do it.

you want more people on quadro
this poll was forged, you censor comments, you add things to posts that users did not write, new ideas are all to often burned down and obstructed. ITS NOT POSSIBLE is all you can say. BAD INTENTIONS is all you suspect. YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT NEW USERS. For all you know they could have been forged as well. Why, YOU HAVE TO BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN OTHERS. If this poll shows anything THE MAJORITY WANT TO SEE A CHANGE, but you seem to be more afraid that someone could take your 3 stars on a platform that LACKS PLAYERS FOR OBVIOUS REASONS!! (and its not the favicon -.-)

now please get your stuff together before I get really grumpy -.-

lol get grumpy, i dont give a fuck.

People were "afraid to post here" because some newbies didn't hear the things they wanted to hear and lo' the world is out to get them.

• Poll was forged? Despite such an act you still get your much wanted "support".
• Censor comments? I've participated in such but i'd look in the way of skiing and suicizer who grow rather tired of all *this*. My only cases of censoring are against flamewars.
• Adding things to posts.. mostly to fix links and/or moderation comments. I admit, i'm not entirely innocent but non of it was done in ill-will.
• The whole purpose of ideas is to be evaluated, and what follows the evaluation is either uplifting of witch-burning. In your case, you have uplifting from kindred spirits and witch-burning from those who've had enough talk and want to see action instead.
• We never said it's not possible, we just gave you lots of reasons why some of the things you expect are either unrealistic or won't work.
• Bad intentions? The only bad intentions i see are from some people who would actually like to greet you personally, if you catch my drift. And don't look at me, i've nothing to do with that, at least not yet And now you accuse me of threatening you and refusing to listen otherwise, amusing. I guess your "BAD INTENTIONS" ring true to you more than most. Consider me joining the slap-that-guy club.
• Complain about new users? My only complaint about new users is having so many spambots that we have to keep active accounts on lockdown. I don't mind new users, i mind dumb users, which is ever so the case as this world goes on.

As you said yourself.. the majority of the people who have voted in this poll want to see a change and YOU HAVE NOT MADE THE SLIGHTEST FUCKING CHANGE SO FAR.
Excuse my rough language, it's unprofessional of me but this will be the last time i share the following sentence, for afterwards i'll simply stop caring entirely and give free reign to either suicizer or skiing who so fondly want you to shut up these last few months: start acting on what you preach, or go back under a rock.

It's real simple. Either start organizing your clean-up job and showing some results, or disappear into quietness. Oh, and if you actually start doing something, do us a favor and don't share it here unless it's about showing the fruits of your work.
I've spoken on this matter for the last time, and i will not be accepting personal messages on irc for this matter anymore.

Quadropolis needs a new generation of new mappers, modding and scripting even from games outside of Sauerbraten.
I don't know where you got the idea from that any comments are censored on this node. Personally, I only moved Chasester's comment as it had nothing to do with the poll, rather with the Sauerbraten Idea Wishlist (this is actually a job for the moderators around here). Else this poll would turn into another wishlist.
We can't rely on things which 'might have been said'. Just post a comment, but be sure to stick to the subject (no wishlisting, etc).

I gave you a finger by creating this poll with the question and options just like you wanted them to be. Yet you are claiming the whole hand instead.
Be glad with the feedback you're receiving! If a group of people advice the same thing, it often has sense and shouldn't be ignored.
If someone gives feedback to an idea, that actually shows off interest from that person instead of just ignoring or saying "No".
No one (at least I didn't, else it seriously wasn't meant like that) literally said that this project is a failure right from the start. We even gave you options to start right away instead of waiting till Eihrul finally would agree.
Instead of hating most of the admins around here, you should be glad with some more experienced minds. SkiingPenguins posted a list which content isn't compatible with your project, Both Razgriz amd IgC gave you some wise advices, while I gave you this poll that will last on Quadropolis forever. I don't see a lot of feedback from any other users so far.

So start a discussion topic (a regular user should be able to do that, so are you) on the forums here and check out who is willing to contact all those authors of content within Sauerbraten (or perhaps a different task).
Taking action on your own is a good thing as well.

to all helpers:

  ->> how we'd make it happen!

Perhaps you could try to get all official maps licensed GPL (v2) or even more free at first instead of starting big and taking a longshot.

Anyway, nice to see some kind of action, but did you convince the developer (Eihrul, maybe even Aardappel) yet?
The file which you're linking to isn't very clear to me about the next phrase:
Honors the source code/developers.
So that stays intact or you want to change it?

That list doesn't seems self-explanatory.

P.S.
There are quite some games out there which already are fully GPLv2, think about Open Arena and such.

another long blablablabling thing on another site. still no action.
And still no good points.

Good Reasons To Do It
1+ Gets your name out to a huge, growing audience
It's already like this
2? We might be the first to ever do this
We might not care about it
3+ Someone will do it eventually ;D
Someone eventually doesn't care too
4+ You will make a lot of people happy
By giving them money maybe, not for sure relicensing something they can already get for free
5+ The hard work was already done
Where's the point of this?
6+ The work is, even if still awesome, years old
A number of 3-4 centuries old books are still sold in bookshops
7+ re-licensing is only a small step away
it's the same of 5
8+ You get something free in return
It's already free, kinda same of 4
9+ Bring sauerbaten in more repos => bigger community
this is the only real valuable point, but as I've suggested you 3 times, you must prove it before.

You're talking about a huge piece of work made by a team in their free time as a given. it's not man!
Respect the work they made. Re-licensing it may be good but, again you're talking about a lot of works, of hours spent on a PC instead of getting out with girls or friend.
You really must, at least, give serious and very valuable reasons.

Seems like Meow won't give any proper reasons at all, as the topic is dead.

Eventually, the chance that this project succeeds to get all content licensed as GPL/BSD/ZLIB is less than 1 to 100 (as the number of conflicting content is more than that, according to Penguin's list. Although his list is excluding any models, skyboxes, sounds and textures, but the content in the data folder as well).
If 1 author won't like your intentions - too bad; project canceled.

To Meow,
There is no "we" on this node. Rather you take charge of the project and contact them all on your own or you ask people (in a direct way) to help you and let them contact for you. In both ways, there should be a supreme leader (else the project is dead even before it started).

So good luck man, you'll need it.

if someone doesnt want to change their license, then a replacement would need to be created / found, which in the case of maps would be difficult. in the case of textures, difficult.

A lot of stuff could get "stolen" from games like Open Arena (textures, models, sounds, etc), as that's GPLv2 licensed after all. Then again, that's not a real advantage on quality aspect in some cases. For the maps; they can't be replaced even made from scratch as a look-a-like is still considered to contain the original map as a base (it would be hard to prove you actually didn't use anything of the original map and it's considered to rather make your own map instead of that of someone else).

Maybe (just maybe) that's why Sauerbraten isn't licensed like that, to prevent such fate over certain content.
Perhaps you should respect the license of Sauerbraten instead of trying to force it.

P.S.
Making Sauerbraten GPLv2 (at least) would mean all content which will be included in the future as well should be licensed like that or even more "free". That's not a good sign as it rapidly brings confusion and clutter (it seriously does) on content and requires a lot more prove that such content really can be licensed as GPLv2 or less restrictive licenses (you have to include the source of every single piece of content).
So you won't gain community, rather scare them off (as there currently is considerably a lot of freedom on Cube Engine 2 when it comes to using custom content. That would be killed by such licenses).
It will also slow down development, as each (darn) file has to be checked (if not double).

GPL compatibility means that a license is compatible with the GPL, not that it needs to be GPL.

The reason is that you can't use e.g. cc-by/sa 3.0 Sauerbraten-content in a GPL game like OpenArena. Many sources suggest chosing GPL compatible licenses, because it gives your content more value. For example: while cc-by and zlib are both permissive and basically do the same thing (require you to keep the author/copyright), afaik cc-by adds no additional value (apart from being popular), but restricts the content of use in GPL projects. (another chart).

Please use the community pad for your arguments & objections from now on!

This is, and always has been, a community project. =) (btw, the competition released their first, free community-map-pack this week ;D)

In other words, you're too lazy to do it yourself and rather want to see others do it. That will be a great contribution to the project and will definetly finish it...

Suicizer, stop insulting me and stop wrecking others spirit with your blatant blinkering.

In case you still can't see it, at least 31 people wanted this to be a community project
(+the 2 you knew of who couldn't vote because you closed this poll 3 days early).

That's about 1/3 of the remaining sauer-community online on this dreary sunday afternoon.

Nowhere does it say it's my project or that I want or can do it by myself and be your punchingbag along the way. I believe I did my best to help build a foundation and would be ok with organizing it to the end. But if there is no will left, but only decreativity, I'll leave this (and most happily you) behind.

Instead of that reply, you could have contacted one of the original author of a certain map instead.

My intentions aren't to wreck spirits or what so ever. However, my intentions are that you open your eyes, take the lead and making some real progress with the project instead of relying on a lot of effort by the community (as there seriously nothing happened yet which made a change). By simply clicking the option "Yes, I'm willing to help" in the poll doesn't prove that all 31 people which state that will do so as well. The term "help" can be defined in a lot of ways also (and not all of them are useful).

I haven't closed the polls at all, they do so automaticly. Stop making things up which are untrue as I have manually added the vote of 1 user as he personally gave me an answer towards the poll; anyone one else didn't.

I'll stop now and wish you the best with the project.

Now now, behave yourself.

no, no, go on pls
on this period of the year ppl loose interest in internet/projects so we need anything to keep a minimum of traffic!
those "fights" are fantastic to increase our stats :P

Plus one to that.

As for the website: I sent eihrul an HTML5 version of the site looking completely the same, as he said he didn't want to change the look at the moment.

However, I have also played with new designs: http://i.imgur.com/M1BTYnd.png and http://i.imgur.com/OYx6jW9.png

Just my two cents.

Like them :) Especially the second one.
Updating or replacing the wiki would be another issue to provide the best information.