What are your views on open-source game engines for non-free games?
- Anmelden oder Registrieren um Kommentare zu schreiben
I am a member!
I was wondering what everyone here thinks about this topic. Examples are OpenMW for Morriwnd, OpenDiablo 2 for Diablo 2, OpenXcom for X-Com, and probably many many more. The topic was inspired by an earlier post about free (libre) games, and I didn't really see these mentioned.
On the one hand, you get to play the games even on platforms the engine wasn't intended to run on, which is definitely nice, on the other hand however, the game is still not free software.
For me, I decided to accept this lesser evil of sorts. I guess it's similar how people accept that Abrowser ships with duckduckgo html as the default search engine, even though it's not free (or even fully open-source).
I still prefer to play free games (one of my current favourites is Crossfire RPG), but I won't immediately say no to a game if there is a free engine available for it.
the game is still not free software.
As far as I understand, it is free *software*... but the *artwork* is not free as in freedom. In theory, you are not even allowed to share unmodified copies of it.
I am a member!
That's a new perspective to me, I haven't considered it from that direction, but sounds about right. Well in that case I guess it's not that big of a concern, as the software is free/libre
The usual stance in the free software movement is that, whatever the type of work (functional, such as software, or artistic, such as graphics/musics/etc.), everybody deserves the freedom to redistribute copies (freedom 2), at least non-commercially. You probably want to watch rms' classical "Copyright vs Community" talk: https://www.gnu.org/audio-video/philosophy-recordings.html?search=Copyright+vs+Community#results
I am a member!
That's a stance I can very much agree with - unfortunately at this stage I'm still willing to make a compromise here and there.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll watch the talk tonight!
Which means, its non-free.
Good to know about the NC part for artwork being okay for free software.
Anyways its interesting.