Re: [Enigma-devel] Competition for new title music

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
As you might know, Debian has a very strict policy, called the Debian
Free Software Guidelines (google for DFSG). They are not obscure, in
fact they were used for "the" Opensource definition.

Everything which doesn't satisfy all these rules - and that includes
"modification" - can't go into the main Debian distribution.
The so called "non-free" part of Debian has slightly weaker
requirements, I believe many Creative Commons licensed stuff can go
there.
Note that none of the current CreativeCommons licenses is considered
"free" with that definition. There is some effort underway to make
some of the next generation CC licenses satisfy these requirements.

> From http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
---
debian-legal contributors recommend that authors who wish to create
works compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines should not
use any of the licenses in the Creative Commons license suite.

Authors who use or are planning to use a Creative Commons license that
includes the NonCommercial or NoDerivs license elements should
understand that these restrictions are incompatible with Free
Software.

Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution 2.0 license
should consider a similar Free Software license such as a BSD- or
MIT-style license [BSD], [MIT].

Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
license should consider a similar Free Software license such as the
GNU General Public License [GPL].
---

I have two requests:
- the title music and other 'essential' parts should satisfy the DFSG,
so use any of BSD, MIT, GPL.
- there should be a source distribution where the non-free parts are
removed; this makes the creation of a free engima package and a
non-free add-on easier
- for parts where a free and eventually a higher quality non-free
version is available (e.g. sound effects), please keep both versions
available, so the system can fall back to the free one if the non-free
parts are not included.

For Debian, I'll have to remove artwork which doesn't satisfy these
requirements. The current title music for example is lacking a similar
license statement (from my understanding, the music is allowed to be
distributed for free with Enigma, but thats it). Proposed new sound
effect packs also had restrictions such as not being allowed to reused
in other projects or modified. Such restrictions are not acceptable
for Debian, and I'll have to remove these files.
I'm not sure if I will do an enigma-nonfree package; especially since
I don't consider title music very important (in fact I disable in-game
music in pretty much any game, since they get boring after hearing
them a few times).

I'm aware that "traditional" artists may be somewhat estranged by
these requests and may be very reluctant to give away so many rights.
But you should be aware, that we - the opensource world - have been
doing that for a long time now, with things where we have put in a lot
of effort, too. I agree that "modifications" might sound less useful
for artwork, but note that even the conversion into a different
format, the addition of special characters to a font, the addition of
hinting to fonts, etc. cound be considered a modification...

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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