What I have to say now is specific to the code and doesn’t involve the artwork at all.
I have been thinking about how we can get as many people playing the game as possible and I think I have hit upon a winning formula. In the very distant future when Hardwar is mature and fun enough we will try to get it distributed on different platforms such as xbox live, steam, play station, etc.
I think this would be both good for the project and open source as a whole. My plan is that we charge for the game in these distribution channels however release the same code base online for free as it is now and always will be. My belief is that people who use these distribution channels are happy to give money to get the game. If not then they always have the choice of downloading directly from our website.
With this plan issues which I have not accounted for may arise to do with the licensing on the code base. One example I can think of right now is if we need to integrate proprietary APIs to make the game work on certain games consoles. Since we’re using the GPL 3 for our code base what do we do? We would not be able to include the proprietary API in our open source code. We also want players to have the freedom to play our game anywhere even if that means they would rather trade freedom for convenience on a closed source games console.
I think the solution is that we have a contributor license agreement for the code base. This would allow us flexibility to publish Hardwar to wherever we wanted while still keeping the game free software.
It’s an issue of trust. I think that trust is earned and so far I have proven myself with my past work and also this project. I am the sole contributor to the code and own all the copyright on it. This change would be business as usual, so I don’t see any problems with this. My motivations for this change are strictly to promote the game in markets that have so far been unreachable by open source games.
Right now our community is non-existent which is why I am proposing this sooner rather then later. Everyone would know what to expect when getting involved with the code.
Java was non-free, yet there were FS Java projects. Similarly, you can have FS written in C under GPL3+, but run it under the BSD libc. There should be no need to relicense the code to run it on proprietary environments.
That’s a valid point but I’d like to remind you of why we’re rewriting the game in the first place. We didn’t own the copyright and couldn’t find who did. Even the Free Software Foundation forces you to sign a contributor license agreement before you can send in patches on their software so what’s the problem with us having one too?
Also I didn’t say I was going to re-license the code away from being open source I want our community to be able to retain control of the copyright so we have the freedom to choose a different open source license if we all choose to just like the wine project, OGRE, CEGUI and a great many other open source projects have done. I don’t want our project having the issues like the Linux kernel has, even if they wanted to choose a different license they can’t.
There is no problem per se in requiring copyright assignment, but this way you will probably get fewer contributors. The FSF gets away with it because everyone uses FSF software and there are many potential contributors out there, and because they have earned their reputation over many years of existence. For a smaller project the impact will be more significant, resulting in it progressing more slowly.
As an aside, I had lots of trouble finding the source code on launchpad, shouldn’t there be a link from hardward.org/ to the launchpad project page?
You’re right about there not being a link. Since the forum broke a few weeks back things have been really screwed up with the website.
What I would like to do is move the discussion away from “if we should have a CLA” and on to “What should be included in the CLA”. For that we have our new forums and I invite you to register and start a new topic if it interests you in talking about this subject in more detail.