SpaceDock.info (Mod Hosting Site)

[katateochi]

Guys, this isn't the thread for discussing Curse or Squad's involvement/position on this, that's over here
This is for talking about Spacedock's development progress, technical issues (and wins!), suggestions etc.

[VITAS]

17 hours ago, MisterFister said:

One and all, I'd like to contribute to this effort.  I have no technical expertise, but I do have LEGAL expertise, as I am graduating law school in 85 days (wow!) and my school has free student-clinic representation for non-profit corporate clients.  I am based in New York, USA, but I can access other jurisdictions either within or potentially outside of the United States through my own personal network of lawyers, law students, and other professionals.

KerbalStuff failed, ultimately, because of a poor incentive-model (cost of time and money) to update and maintain it.

SpaceDock, or any successor, will eventually run into the same problem in some form.  Squad's licensing, of course, is with Curse.  Curse predicates its own commitment to Squad based on an economic model of forcing mod downloaders to physically visit their website and be exposed to banner ads as their primary method of cost defrayment and profit generation.  This is reasonable, because mod cloud-storage is not free; mod hosting and listing and indexing is not free; and bandwidth for mod downloading is not free.  Indeed, anyone who knows or prefers CKAN understands that Curse is VERY CKAN-unfriendly, as CKAN is based on metadata files that presume the ability to remote-call and remote-download hosted mods -- Curse actually updated their software to affirmatively prevent CKAN from doing it's thing, specifically to ensure that mod downloaders were forcibly exposed to Curse's banner ads.  This is why CKAN management favored a mod that was hosted on KerbalStuff, Github, or some other miscellaneous hosting (such as Dropbox / OneDrive / GDrive / etc.)

I am unfamiliar as to the exact particulars of Squad's licensing, but I'm fairly certain that Curse's deal is one of exclusivity -- that any other mod-hosting site is prevented by licensing restrictions from adopting any for-profit model that would compete with Curse.

My Proposal: With someone else's help, I can act as point man in forming a non-profit corporation of some kind (my own jurisdiction of New York would offer several filing options for this, and other jurisdictions may offer different options, each with advantages and disadvantages.)  I can even serve as a member of a corporation's managing board.  I suggest we find a way to manage and navigate the existing licensing restrictions, or possibly even negotiate with Squad in good faith to allow some form of compromise solution, that would allow SpaceDock or some KerbalStuff-successor to operate and generate modest revenue from hosting and CKAN integration, not for the purpose of generating lasting profits, but for the exclusive purpose of strengthening the non-profit product so that it remains as available and robust as the technology could allow.  From actually offsetting the digital costs of webhosting and bandwidth, I foresee the possibility to manage a small cohort of otherwise-volunteer programmers and other mod hobbyists by actually offering them some sort of financial incentive to donate their time.  I'm not suggesting we hire someone full time with salary and benefits, but something that would make their late nights of sacrificed personal time worthwhile.

I can be reached by PM here, or by email directly at [email protected].  I get a lot of emails from other sources, so to make yours stand out, please indicate "KerbalStuff Successor" in the subject line.  I am convinced that there can exist a fully-legal, fully-compliant, self-sustaining solution to this issue, and I'd care to be a significant contributor to that effort.

Best,
David

I welcome your offer for help.

For info: im from Germany and the Server is also based in germany. So german law applies.

im unsure how ell youre verst in german law. But i would welcome your help in writing watertight documents and help out if problems arries, that involves US juristiction.

In germany theres the the legal construct of a club (e.V. = eingetragner verein) as far as i know at least 3? or 5? people have to get together to form such a club, draft up the clubs statues, elect a club president and such.

apart from that there is too is the possibility to form a foundation but req. are way higher than for a club.

since im no lawyer i would check with official sources to confirm if im right.

but anyway: big thanks for offering another building block to make this a real professional affair.

[GDJ]

17 hours ago, MisterFister said:

One and all, I'd like to contribute to this effort.  I have no technical expertise, but I do have LEGAL expertise, as I am graduating law school in 85 days (wow!) and my school has free student-clinic representation for non-profit corporate clients.  I am based in New York, USA, but I can access other jurisdictions either within or potentially outside of the United States through my own personal network of lawyers, law students, and other professionals.

KerbalStuff failed, ultimately, because of a poor incentive-model (cost of time and money) to update and maintain it.

SpaceDock, or any successor, will eventually run into the same problem in some form.  Squad's licensing, of course, is with Curse.  Curse predicates its own commitment to Squad based on an economic model of forcing mod downloaders to physically visit their website and be exposed to banner ads as their primary method of cost defrayment and profit generation.  This is reasonable, because mod cloud-storage is not free; mod hosting and listing and indexing is not free; and bandwidth for mod downloading is not free.  Indeed, anyone who knows or prefers CKAN understands that Curse is VERY CKAN-unfriendly, as CKAN is based on metadata files that presume the ability to remote-call and remote-download hosted mods -- Curse actually updated their software to affirmatively prevent CKAN from doing it's thing, specifically to ensure that mod downloaders were forcibly exposed to Curse's banner ads.  This is why CKAN management favored a mod that was hosted on KerbalStuff, Github, or some other miscellaneous hosting (such as Dropbox / OneDrive / GDrive / etc.)

I am unfamiliar as to the exact particulars of Squad's licensing, but I'm fairly certain that Curse's deal is one of exclusivity -- that any other mod-hosting site is prevented by licensing restrictions from adopting any for-profit model that would compete with Curse.

My Proposal: With someone else's help, I can act as point man in forming a non-profit corporation of some kind (my own jurisdiction of New York would offer several filing options for this, and other jurisdictions may offer different options, each with advantages and disadvantages.)  I can even serve as a member of a corporation's managing board.  I suggest we find a way to manage and navigate the existing licensing restrictions, or possibly even negotiate with Squad in good faith to allow some form of compromise solution, that would allow SpaceDock or some KerbalStuff-successor to operate and generate modest revenue from hosting and CKAN integration, not for the purpose of generating lasting profits, but for the exclusive purpose of strengthening the non-profit product so that it remains as available and robust as the technology could allow.  From actually offsetting the digital costs of webhosting and bandwidth, I foresee the possibility to manage a small cohort of otherwise-volunteer programmers and other mod hobbyists by actually offering them some sort of financial incentive to donate their time.  I'm not suggesting we hire someone full time with salary and benefits, but something that would make their late nights of sacrificed personal time worthwhile.

I can be reached by PM here, or by email directly at [email protected].  I get a lot of emails from other sources, so to make yours stand out, please indicate "KerbalStuff Successor" in the subject line.  I am convinced that there can exist a fully-legal, fully-compliant, self-sustaining solution to this issue, and I'd care to be a significant contributor to that effort.

Best,
David

SpaceDock developers: I would seriously look into this. I'm not telling you all what to do, but this is worth exploring.
And I'm sure David would not have any problem divulging any credentials he may have to prove his worth, as well as laying out a detailed business proposal.

[AlphaAsh]

I wouldn't. How do you think services like Curse get started?

@VITAS - A non-profit service does not exclude the generating of revenue in order to cover the salaries of employed staff. This is considered to be part of the running service.

Services like Curse are a middle-man to what should be free stuff and ultimately deny modders any kind of revenue stream. Many start seemingly innocent but then ads appear, a premium service appears and at some point the term 'non-profit' stops being used.

If you choose to go this route I won't be hosting mods with SpaceDock.info.

 

Edited February 21, 2016 by AlphaAsh

[VITAS]

I still hold by my statement: No Ads.

who wouldnt be happy to life off what he likes to do but i dont belive that will ever happen with spacedock.

i want it to be there for everyone to exist and thats why im sinking so much time and money into it.

the only business model i have is: it should keep to its strength: simple, no hassel downloads, fast, no ads

if any legal cunstruct can help keep it that way i will look into it if it deludes the thes goals ive no interrest in them.

a club isnt like a foundation its merly a gathering of like minded like we are atm with some legal benefits to act as group not as individuals.

but even that avenue isnt even a topic of discussion among my fellow team members. we concentrate on one thing alone: to get sustainable structers up and trunning that gurantee you the existance of this site as long as there will be someone playing ksp.

so everyone is welcomed who wants to contribout something be it money or his/her profession.

and when we are ready we will talk about whats next

 

you are a great comunity!

 

p.s. im unemployed atm so job offers would be welcome

Edited February 21, 2016 by VITAS

[Stone Blue]

DING! DING! DING!

Congrats, SpaceDock Team!

You've just reached 200 mods hosted, and 1,030 users in just a few days...

Well done!

And again, a BIG THANK YOU to SirCmpwn, for originally developing the working code, and for a seemingly quick and painless handover, despite the heated situation...

Hopefully SpaceDock will hit 1000 mods by next week...

Edited February 21, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Unknown601]

.

[NotAnAmazingKerbal]

Sorry, but for me, CKAN is still pulling from KerbalStuff. Trying to find out the problem... 

[VITAS]

ask in #ckan on irc.esper.net maybe they can help you

 

[katateochi]

@VITAS is that the new logo for Spacedock? I like it! 

[VITAS]

yes it is.

we are working on the retheming of the site as we speak.

 

 

p.s. got my email and want to hop into our chan #spacedock to talk about it?

Edited February 21, 2016 by VITAS

[sumghai]

I will not be hosting any of my mods on SpaceDock, but I have a couple of questions:

- If someone rehosts my work without my permission, what mechanisms will be in place to deal with this? Will it depend on strict adherence to the licence, or would the author's personal request to remove the content suffice?

- How do you ensure that content uploaded to SpaceDock does not contain malware, either from an accidentally infected file, or malicious content deliberately inserted by the uploader?

[Kelidoskoped]

Heh, Squad. Curse sucks. KerbalStuff's replacement came on the same day as KerbalStuff went off. I'll happily pay $1 a month to get around using Curse (it's named that way for a reason!!) and Squad should've just endorsed KerbalStuff. Now you just lost sales.

[VITAS]

Good questions

1.If you can proof that youre the copyright owner and the licence you published it under via your default distribution channels (e.g. forum) is prohibiting it from beeing posted without your consent we will remove it. You can send such requests via email (see spacedock.info for address).

2. we do av scans on uploaded files. we are aware that some viruses wont even be detected with heuristic scans. Thats why we encourage everyone to send us information about possibel infected files either here or via email.

[Kelidoskoped]

@VITAS thanks for your great work. Everyone's upset about KerbalStuff going down..

[linuxgurugamer]

39 minutes ago, Kelidoskoped said:

Heh, Squad. Curse sucks. KerbalStuff's replacement came on the same day as KerbalStuff went off. I'll happily pay $1 a month to get around using Curse (it's named that way for a reason!!) and Squad should've just endorsed KerbalStuff. Now you just lost sales.

If you are willing to pay, then go to the Patreon page and sign up.  I did, I'm doing $5/month for this.

Otherwise, stop complaining

[Kelidoskoped]

Just now, linuxgurugamer said:

If you are willing to pay, then go to the Patreon page and sign up.  I did, I'm doing $5/month for this.

Otherwise, stop complaining

Who said I was complaining? And I did. Btw, Linux is just as bad as Windows now..

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, Kelidoskoped said:

Who said I was complaining? And I did. Btw, Linux is just as bad as Windows now..

Then congratulations, and I'm sorry if it came over harshly, but your comment didn't say that you were paying, only that you would.

And I'm not going to get into an OS flamewar.  I use Windows 10, Linux (Fedora & CentOS), and OSX on a daily basis.  All are good.  Depends on what you are doing.

I play KSP on Linux, regularly have 12 gig of memory in use (over 200  mods).  No crashes.

[sumghai]

35 minutes ago, VITAS said:

1.If you can proof that youre the copyright owner and the licence you published it under via your default distribution channels (e.g. forum) is prohibiting it from beeing posted without your consent we will remove it. You can send such requests via email (see spacedock.info for address).

While I can easily prove I've the original author of the mod, I'm using the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, which to my understanding automatically allows redistribution of remixes, even those whose content and redistribution are against my wishes. Unfortunately, I'm unable to retroactively apply a more restrictive licence to my work either.

I suppose the only C.Y.A. thing I can now to is to simply refuse to provide support to anyone who downloaded my mod from anywhere other than CurseForge or GitHub.

35 minutes ago, VITAS said:

2. we do av scans on uploaded files. we are aware that some viruses wont even be detected with heuristic scans. Thats why we encourage everyone to send us information about possibel infected files either here or via email.

My query wasn't about detecting viruses or other traditional forms of malware, but rather, how the system would handle mods deliberately designed to interfere with other mods, hostile forks of a project, or plugins/executables that collect and send statistics without the user's knowledge.

[DMagic]

5 minutes ago, sumghai said:

My query wasn't about detecting viruses or other traditional forms of malware, but rather, how the system would handle mods deliberately designed to interfere with other mods, hostile forks of a project, or plugins/executables that collect and send statistics without the user's knowledge.

Why would any of this be a problem, or something for SpaceDock to handle?

The thing about collecting statistics or gathering personal info has already been addressed in the addon rules. I guess someone could create such a mod, upload to SpaceDock, but not release it on the forums, but that doesn't seem too likely and there could be a more detailed discussion of what to do about it when it actually happens.

As for interfering with other mods; why should SpaceDock have any say about that? I can understand why a mod creator might be unhappy when someone creates something meant to alter their mod (like a 64-bit unlocker), but I don't see why a hosting site should do anything about it. The same goes for someone releasing a fork of a non-restrictively licensed mod (which also doesn't seem like something that is very likely to happen); I guess some measures could be taken to clarify that the fork is not the same as the original and may not be supported.

[sumghai]

2 minutes ago, DMagic said:

Why would any of this be a problem, or something for SpaceDock to handle?

I'm mainly concerned that (to my knowledge) Spacedock doesn't have a content-reviewing system beyond virus-scanning.

Another example of undesirable content that not even the original Kerbal Spaceport handled properly is dummy or placeholder uploads - a user once uploaded to Spaceport what he claimed to be a multiplayer plugin, but the zip file turned out to be a "Hello World" .bat file.

All in all, I don't plan on using Spacedock, but at the very least, I want to help you guys C.Y.A. when it comes to potential problems now, rather than dealing with them belatedly as they occur.

[DStaal]

The problem with trying to moderate the contents in some way is that beyond the actively malicious (viri and such), it's hard to tell the difference between a mod that is doing something wanted and one that isn't - 'actively interfering' for instance could apply to the UKS suite of mods with regards to Extraplanetary Launchpads: The UKS mods redefine the build materials and disable all but a couple of the EL parts.  But that's as designed, and they are intended to work together.  Or you get the various Kopernicus mods that add extra planets - at what point does the fact that they don't play well together become 'actively interfering'?  Does it really matter?

Similar applies to placeholders - Some big, popular mods appear to have started with one or two parts.  Would you have dumped them at the beginning because they didn't do what they were planning yet?  How long do they have to 'get where they are going'?  (And if they develop in a different way than the developer intended, is that a problem?)

I'm in favor of the caveat emptor approach, in general: SpaceDock can certify that this won't be a virus, or try to destroy your computer.  What it does to your game is up to you to research.

[Table]

22 hours ago, ouyin2000 said:

I didn't say you're an idiot. I said they already have an official mod site. With no intention of switching.

 

Curse is actually not a bad hosting site. Plus it has the infrastructure, staff, and reliability to host long term. Unlike KerbalStuff

But in my opinion, I like SpaceDock, or previously KerbalStuff better

[politas]

59 minutes ago, sumghai said:

While I can easily prove I've the original author of the mod, I'm using the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, which to my understanding automatically allows redistribution of remixes, even those whose content and redistribution are against my wishes. Unfortunately, I'm unable to retroactively apply a more restrictive licence to my work either.

I suppose the only C.Y.A. thing I can now to is to simply refuse to provide support to anyone who downloaded my mod from anywhere other than CurseForge or GitHub.

My query wasn't about detecting viruses or other traditional forms of malware, but rather, how the system would handle mods deliberately designed to interfere with other mods, hostile forks of a project, or plugins/executables that collect and send statistics without the user's knowledge.

Well, the licence you've used allows forks, but since attribution is required, I don't see what you mean by "hostile" forks. They would have to be labelled as forks, and people could choose whether to use the fork or continue using your originals. Is this something you're particularly concerned about? 

CKAN is downloading all your mods from github, and even if someone were to load them up to Spaceport (and I've never heard of anyone doing such a thing), we would be unlikely to switch over from github.

[Farix]

16 minutes ago, politas said:

if someone were to load them up to Spaceport (and I've never heard of anyone doing such a thing), we would be unlikely to switch over from github.

The question is, if a mod author requests that SpaceDock remove their mod from their repository, will SpaceDock honor the request? The same applies to CKAN.