Ruminations on modding etiquette. (Split from another thread.)

[linuxgurugamer]

5 hours ago, Divstator said:

I have a question. How does ARR affect pull requests on Github? As a user(or maybe superuser) and not an author, how do I know that pull requests are welcome or unwelcome in a ARR situation? If a mod is ARR, I take that to mean, any change other than the author's is unwelcome, unless specifically stated to the contrary.

As a side note, ARR won't stop me from changing a mod or adding to it for my personal game(how would anybody but me even know I did?), however it will keep me from publishing it. I pose this question, so that if ARR is chosen and you still want to take advantage of pull requests, perhaps it should be stated explicitly? Ya know as a protocol kind of thing?

Much props to the authors btw.

When you use Github, you are accepting Github's Terms of Service, which give permission for repos to be cloned and forked if they are public.  Anything beyond that is covered by the original license.

 

[Thygrrr]

On 10/9/2018 at 6:30 PM, linuxgurugamer said:

I never heard of courtesy being unnecessary.

It's the very essence of not being a necessity; and people going out of their way to be courteous actually is what makes courtesy "nice."
 

[Lisias]

On 10/11/2018 at 1:55 AM, Divstator said:

I have a question. How does ARR affect pull requests on Github? As a user(or maybe superuser) and not an author, how do I know that pull requests are welcome or unwelcome in a ARR situation? If a mod is ARR, I take that to mean, any change other than the author's is unwelcome, unless specifically stated to the contrary.

EXCELLENT question.

ARR mods should not accept pull requests from anyone. The pull request's author is also an author too, and usually it's accepted that the code being pulled has the same license of the target codebase. The mod is GPL2? Your pull request should be licensed under the GPL2.

If the codebase is ARR, your code being pulled is ARR. TO YOU. So it's a license violation to accept such pull request without a formal, written and traceable explicit permission from the pull request author. And no, the mere existence of the pull request is not enough. Any novel writer would be in hell if any scoundrel could claim copyright infringement because the latter snail mailed him an addendum to his work.  

On 10/11/2018 at 1:55 AM, Divstator said:

[cut by me] I pose this question, so that if ARR is chosen and you still want to take advantage of pull requests, perhaps it should be stated explicitly? Ya know as a protocol kind of thing?

If the mod is ARR, it should not accept pull requests. It will be a copyright hell having to trace the explicit authorization from every single commit that it's not their own.

Unless the committer explicitly grants the repo owner a perpetual authorization to his works, what would be nonsense and demand a legal contract between the parts.  

— — — — — Merged unrelated message — — — — —

I thought of something that can be of use to people in need to embed CC-ND works on their package.

If every single file being embedded (including the DLL) is being published also in a unpackaged form, the original package is not the only "copy" of the Work! So, if I can download the DLL, I can redistribute it in the very same way I would do with the ZIP file.

So, embedding such a mod into your's own mod package is not creating a derivative. It's just redistributing the Work into a new medium (your package).

And since it's usual practice to commit the DLL on the GameData folder on Github, that settles the matter IMHO.

Edited October 15, 2018 by Lisias
tyops. tyops, tyops everywhere!