Source code for two Stars Wars games released under the GPL
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0MzA
Old games, but I remember Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy being fun games and now the source code is released under the GPLv2. Interesting to see if anyone takes advantage of this engine, but its a shame the engine is so old. :(
Both games look nice to me, but I wonder if the look is included in the source, probably not :)
Any game engine being made free is a good thing, but what we really need is for current game engines to be free, not just old ones. When they release the engines late like this, it's not much more than a publicity stunt; they have found that they are not making money from the games anymore, so they decide that it can't possibly hurt to make the engine "open source". In other words, they believe that free software is against their interests, but pretend to support it by releasing old engines.
I don't want to discourage releasing old games' engines; late is much better than never, but we must not be made content by it, falling for their cheap publicity stunt.
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I think we need to focus on the hardware front more although the point I'm trying to make is actually that we should be working on investing in business models that are fostered by free software. Be it those are games, hardware, or entertainment. And it doesn't just have to be those developing software. For example we could try and come up with fund mechanism that get out quality movies.
Donating in and of itself is not enough. We need to focus on how to produce more money from the donation than was donated.
Firefox is a good example of this. There were donations that got it a lot of publicity. However it now brings in a lot of money from search engines.
Speaking of Firefox, there was a lot of news recently about them partnering with Samsung to create a new browser engine called Servo. This was around the time that Google said they were forking WebKit to create Blink.
Samsung currently owns like 80% of the Android market and if they make Firefox the default, this can be a big push for Mozilla. Mozilla needs to keep their intentions clear in their relationship with Samsung and keep pushing standards and royalty free media no matter what.
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I love marketing because is both complex and fascinating so it allow an entity
whether natural or legal to promote it´s products, services, trademark or name,
but often is use in a way that induce to error, misinform and try to bend the
truth. Sadly this appear to be the case in this instance, but at the same time the
community will enjoy an unintended collateral benefit with this move, by been
acknowledge of it presence, roll and existence.
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I don't think we gain anything from this, to be honest. These games were built on the Quake 3 engine, which id Software freed 7 and a half years ago. The Star Wars content is likely still proprietary to Disney.
Good news!
Apparently no media was released. As pointed out, there are already many free engines. What might be more needed is freely licensed graphics and audio. Like http://opengameart.org/
And then last but not least someone to put it all together.
Help building a catalog of games using free software and freely licensed media assets at http://libregamewiki.org/
Or help listing free software in a semantic wiki at http://directory.fsf.org/
Free software and free culture are like a brain, the more interconnections there are, the better it all works!
While I like free culture as much as free software I'm thinking that as long as the game engine is free I'm okay with paying for the content. If I remember right RMS approved of such practices in one of his essays as well.
Overall I do agree with one of the previous posts in that this is probably just a publicity stunt since these games were no longer making the company any money. I'm also glad it was released but it's not enough to release source code to decade-old games and nothing more modern.
That sounds somewhat confusing. So just in case.
Free in free software or free culture refers to freedom, not price. E.g. not all free software is gratis.
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I do like free culture, but at the same time, I can see why one would benefit from not making the game(art, sounds and so on) free but making the game engine free.
The reference I was thinking of was actually the recent article RMS wrote about Steam coming to GNU/linux. The link is https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html
RMS States:
"Free software is a matter of freedom, not price. A free game need not be gratis. It is feasible to develop free games commercially, while respecting your freedom to change the software you use. Since the art in the game is not software, it does not need to be free. There is in fact free game software developed by companies, as well as free games developed noncommercially by volunteers. Crowdfunding development will only get easier."
This is where I'm on the fence about the best way to do things.
I completely disagree with RMS and the GNU Project when they say art in games, or art in general, is non-functional data and thus doesn't need to be free.
Art, specially when used in games and other kinds of software, is rarely non-functional. Art is not just about prettiness it's about directing the person in her interactions with the software.
Also, let's suppose I design and develop lovable 2D/3D characters and worlds that can be used and reused in games and stories. Wouldn't it be better for all of us if I release them as a free cultural works? People could create games with stories that I would have never think about. With non-free art, it just stays with the person who created it and we have to wait ~70 years after her death to be able to use it freely (if she had no descendants).
Since I found out the freedom exception for art, I don't consider GNU nor free software distributions really free.
> Since I found out the freedom exception for art, I don't consider
> GNU nor free software distributions really free.
All free distros have to be entirely redistributable, among other
requirements. I believe RMS is just saying that he doesn't consider it
/unethical/ to distribute licensed non-functional works that disallow
modification.
Read about this here:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html#non-functional-data
I know that definition of non-functional data, I linked to it in my post.
To me, license to copy and redistribute is not enough. In the games context, I'd like to be able to take a 3D character, for example, and add it 2 more hands and a tail, or take its head and put it on another character's body.
If a license to copy and redistribute doesn't allow me to do what I said above, then I think art with such licenses should not be distributed nor recommended by free software distributions.
I disagree with RMS and free software distributions in that point, among others.
But this is probably a discussion for another thread :)
Code and art are two different things and RMS is actually right on this one.
This is sort of the way I view it:
With most creative works, such as books, game sprites, and music, the main things stopping them from being free are copyright and DRM. Software is different, though: copyright and DRM are still used to prevent it from being free, but the usual way of making software nonfree is to withhold the source code. Without the source code, changes are impossible even if they become legal someday.
DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is something which deliberately attacks freedom, so I think we should refuse anything distributed with DRM for that reason. But with creative works which are only nonfree because of copyright, and which don't do a functional job, it's not imperative that they be free.
Here's why: you mention that, in games for example, non-functional data such as images are important, and that's true, but it doesn't have to be those images; an image is an image, and one can be substituted for another completely different image. See Freedoom, for example. In addition, if copyright is all that's stopping the work from being free, abolishing copyright or otherwise getting the work into the public domain (e.g. by drastically shortening copyright) will have the desired effect. This is not necessarily the case when technical means are what stop the work from being free; if you don't have the source code to a program, you still can't effectively change it even if the law isn't stopping you.
And then there's the fact that nonfree software can have malicious features, while non-functional data such as images cannot.
So at the core, I agree; all creative works should be free, but unlike with software, non-functional works being nonfree today is not a disaster.
So if the source code is under the GPL but the images, video, and audio are under a Creative Commons license like "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported" (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) then we should be ok?
I think that's acceptable, yes.
There is actually one case of someone using a nonfree license for nonfunctional data that I particularly don't like, and that's PlaneShift. The PlaneShift license for the nonfunctional game data says that you can only use the game data with a client distributed by the PlaneShift developers on their servers. I don't like this because it's completely inappropriate for a game data license, a backhanded tactic to be restrictive while still being able to boast that the software is "open source". In fact, they proudly claim in a page that the purpose of this is to prevent forks: http://www.planeshift.it/license.html
So I'm aware of one case where someone has managed to use nonfree non-functional data to effectively restrict freedom (though I doubt it would hold up well in court), but as far as I know, it is currently unique. Doom, for example, can be played with any free (or nonfree, but why would you do that?) Doom engine. Similarly, nobody can stop you from using AssaultCube's nonfunctional data when playing with whatever modifications you like to the client on any server you wish.