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

[linuxgurugamer]

[snip]

Even if a license permits, it's always nice to ask for permission when including something from another mod

Keep in mind that I am the custodian of both mods, so getting permission was rather easy. 

 

Edited October 10, 2018 by Vanamonde

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Even if a license permits, it's always nice to ask for permission when including something from another mod

If the license permits, the permission is already granted.

[johnkeale]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

If the license permits, the permission is already granted.

Yep. But asking for permission, even if just for formalities, is I think a nice courtesy to do.

[linuxgurugamer]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

If the license permits, the permission is already granted.

Legal permission, yes.  But it's nice to ask and be asked (for the author)

[Lisias]

1 minute ago, johnkeale said:

Yep. But asking for permission, even if just for formalities, is I think a nice courtesy to do.

Yep. But that's all what it is. Unnecessary (besides being nice) courtesy,

[linuxgurugamer]

On 10/8/2018 at 7:25 AM, Lisias said:

Yep. But that's all what it is. Unnecessary (besides being nice) courtesy,

I never heard of courtesy being unnecessary.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I never heard of courtesy being unnecessary.

Now you have. There's no courtesy on laws and legislations.

Once you license a work using a License, people are bounded to that license and nothing more.

You can politely ask for permission, but you can't deny the rightful use if they don't ask you such permission. Ergo, such politeness is unnecessary.

What's different of being wrong doing it. It's just… Unnecessary.

[Vanamonde]

So guys, how about not getting into an argument about what constitutes politeness?

[Vanamonde]

Trimmed a post. Guys, when we asked you to play nice, that meant we wanted you to, you know, stop being cranky and condescending with each other. 

[Dutchbook]

@Lisias, the problem with that attitude is that it can allow for all sorts of modding derivatives (up to and including simple logo changes to show that the original mod is now 'mine') to spawn without the original modder knowing about it. Everybody that has ever dealt with videogame mods knows that plagiarism is rampant in that community, and that easily finding the original source of a mod is not a given.

Asking for it allows the licensee to check whether what they invision is indeed allowed under the license, and it in turn allows the licensor to keep an overview of what is out there, and makes it easier for all parties to look out for stolen/plagiarised stuff.

The transparency and etiquette of the KSP modding community is a needle in a haystack (when was the last time you downloaded a mod for another with a clear license and source code included in the download?), and we should cherish and nurture it. Communication between all parties has brought us this far and has more often then once defused "permission or not?" discussions.

Asking for permission, even though it is not necessary in view of the licensee, is a small effort that can save a lot of time and energy down the road.

[xEvilReeperx]

This is precisely why I won't incorporate the work of others into my own stuff: a large number of these licenses have either been poisoned by unwritten rules or do not reflect the actual intent of the owner who has copy-pasted it from somewhere, and so they might as well be All Rights Reserved.

Secret, unwritten rules are not transparency. If I look at a license that says YOU MAY DO ANYTHING WITH THIS WORK and think, gee, I'll have to make sure that's true, then the license is incomplete at best and useless at worst.

[Snark]

I've observed that there appear to be two very distinct (and contradictory) schools of thought, out there in the extended community which is "KSP modding, somewhat overlapping with open-source folks".  For lack of a better term, I might describe these as "author-centric etiquette" versus "license-centric etiquette".  At the risk of putting words in people's mouths, these two worldviews might be summarized something like this:

• Author-centric:  "Just because a thing is legal doesn't mean it's polite.  Even if you're legally allowed to do something with someone's mod, it's just common courtesy to at least try to contact the author to get a thumbs up from them, and/or let them know what you're doing.  Failing to do so is just rude."
• License-centric:  "The license is the etiquette.  There's no 'unwritten rule' here, and presuming that anyone is supposed to follow any 'unwritten rule' is being unreasonable.  The author has given their permission, in advance, specifically by choosing that license.  Which means that's all you need, and nobody should expect anyone to notify beyond."

In the thread thus far, I've seen posts from folks falling into each of the above categories.

As for myself?  Historically, I was always author-centric (to the point that, living in my own little bubble on the KSP forums, I was unaware of the existence and emphatic feelings of the license-centric contingent).  This lasted up until an incident that happened with one of my mods, which was rather a "wake-up call" for me, and went a long way towards educating me about the various viewpoints on this issue.

A lengthy discussion of the incident is here:

...but what it boils down to is that I used to have a very permissive license on all of my mods, MIT, which boils down to "anybody can do anything with it, as long as you give me credit".  I'd been just implicitly assuming an author-centric world, and that "the community is made of nice people so of course they'll ask me before they do something with it."  But then someone did something without asking me, on Reddit, and when I posted there to object ("hey, you could have asked!")... the response ripped me several new orifices.

Basically, I was ridiculed for thinking that-- it was a very license-centric response.  Essentially, it boiled down to "Dude, if you didn't want people to copy your stuff and do things with it, why the hell did you pick an MIT license?  The whole point of that license is that you're telling everyone 'go for it'!"

And, well... I have to admit that they kind of had a point.  I'm still rather "author-centric" in terms of my preferences and sympathies... but I think that viewpoint works best in a world that's a small, closed system of a relatively limited number of people who are all acquainted.  It's a "family" dynamic.  Whereas the license-centric viewpoint works better in a world full of a large (and unknowable) number of unknown people.  It's a "strangers" dynamic.

Put simply:  I think the author-centric view works better in a "family-like" setting, whereas the license-centric view becomes more manageable in a world of strangers.  The reason I ran into problems was that I was thinking in "family" terms ("it's just the KSP forum, we're all pals here"), whereas in reality, the environment where my mods live is the Internet, not just the KSP forum... which is a community of strangers.  So I can kinda see where those folks were coming from, even though it wasn't the kind of world I preferred to think of myself as living in.

Personally... I'm still author-centric in my personal preferences; it's just a built-in emotional bias that I can't do anything about, it's how I'm wired.  However, I think it's important to acknowledge the license-centric view; it's there for a reason.  And I recognize that the author-centric view can have an unintended "chilling" effect, as @xEvilReeperx notes above:

4 hours ago, xEvilReeperx said:

This is precisely why I won't incorporate the work of others into my own stuff: a large number of these licenses have either been poisoned by unwritten rules or do not reflect the actual intent of the owner who has copy-pasted it from somewhere, and so they might as well be All Rights Reserved.

Secret, unwritten rules are not transparency. If I look at a license that says YOU MAY DO ANYTHING WITH THIS WORK and think, gee, I'll have to make sure that's true, then the license is incomplete at best and useless at worst.

^ That right there is a perfectly reasonable argument in favor of license-centrism.

(In case anyone's wondering "so what happened with your mods and the licenses and stuff, as a result of that incident?":  what I ended up doing was to lock nearly all my mods down very tight, with a highly restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license that doesn't let anyone but me tinker with them.  I didn't really like doing so, but I felt that it was the only way for me to stay sane and continue to enjoy producing my mods.  It was basically a more accurate and "honest" way of stating what my actual preferences are, which after all is what a license is all about.)

[CobaltWolf]

Very good way of putting it @Snark. Personally, I have almost always messaged to ask permission even if something is openly licensed. Not only because I view it as polite but also because I want to let them know that I am making use of their work, so they can see what I'm doing with it! I certainly know I am interested in the fate of any derivatives of my work.

[linuxgurugamer]

Same here.  This thread started because I said it would be nice to contact the author first, not that it was required.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

This thread started because I said it would be nice to contact the author first, not that it was required.

Sure.  And I happen to agree with you that it's nice... but then, I'm an author-centrist, not a license-centrist. 

I don't think anyone's disagreeing about what's required-- it's written right there in the license, in black and white.  I think the schism is more a matter of what people consider nice and/or appropriate.

I don't see either the author-centrists or the license-centrists as particularly holding any moral "high ground".  It's not that the license-centrists aren't nice, or lacking in etiquette.  They simply have a different definition of what constitutes "nice".

That particular definition doesn't happen to match my own... but I can see their point, at least, and I don't think I'm in any position to point fingers and say that my ethos is any "better" than theirs.  It's just different, is all.

[Poodmund]

I echo Snark's sentiments that from a personal preference point of view, an 'Author-centric' mindset is a nice way to go about things but at the end of the day, the license is the one thing that tells others what they can and can't do with any of your work. License your work accordingly. You can't expect other people to respect your unwritten wishes so if you want creative control over your work, license it in a way that contact has to be made prior to any derivative work, changes or collaboration is made.

I used to license my mods as CC-BY-NC-ND but others around the internet were still appropriating my work into their 'mod packs' et al. As a result, all of my stuff is now ARR going forward... if anyone wants to use my work, force them into that personal request and then you can make that decision as what they can and can't do and retain creative control over your work.

Edited October 10, 2018 by Poodmund

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, Poodmund said:

I used to license my mods as CC-BY-NC-ND but others around the internet were still appropriating my work into their 'mod packs' et al. As a result, all of my stuff is now ARR going forward

What's the difference from a practical point of view, if the license was CC-BY-NC-ND and they were ignoring your license, what makes you think that ARR will change anything?  Not challenging, but curious

Silly me, I got confused with No Derivatives and no distribution 

Edited October 10, 2018 by linuxgurugamer

[Snark]

32 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

What's the difference from a practical point of view, if the license was CC-BY-NC-ND and they were ignoring your license, what makes you think that ARR will change anything?  Not challenging, but curious

Silly me, I got confused with No Derivatives and no distribution 

Just for the sake of anyone else reading this, who might not be as conversant with the licenses mentioned:

• ARR ("All Rights Reserved") is, essentially, the nuclear option.  It means that people can download and use your mod, but nothing else.  They can't use it in their own stuff.  They can't tinker with it and release a modified copy.  They can't even host it or redistribute it-- i.e. suppose you make an ARR mod and put it up for download on, say, SpaceDock.  That would mean that nobody could host it anywhere else-- your SpaceDock page would be the only place anyone's legally allowed to download it, and if you-the-author ever take down that page, the mod immediately becomes completely unavailable to everyone.
• CC-BY-NC-ND is pretty close to ARR, but it does allow redistribution, of unmodified copies.  It means people are free to take your download, exactly as-is, and share it, re-host it, etc. to their heart's content.  This option means that you're relinquishing control of downloads, but it's still the case that you're the sole source of any updates or changes, and nobody can use your stuff in their stuff.

Or, in short:  ARR is "you have permission to download and use it, but nothing else."  CC-BY-NC-ND is "you have permission to download it, use it, and upload it to other download sites, but nothing else."

[linuxgurugamer]

This discussion is giving me reason to consider changing the licenses  on my mods (the ones I wrote) to an ARR, with some sort of clause in case I disappear.  I just found out that a m ou flack on the forums is including 3 of my mods, and I could have sworn that this was resolved months ago in favor of giving the modpack owner get permission before including them.  This is a good time, I'll  make my decision before 1.5 drops.  

[HebaruSan]

Side note, Kerbal mods are in an interesting place with respect to the typical usage of the GPL, owing to the forum rule that mod threads must include a link to the source code regardless of license. In other contexts, a developer might release an open source project under a GPL license to ensure that any derivative works remain open and allow others to learn from reading the code (among many other things, of course).

But in order to be announced on these forums, even an All Rights Reserved mod must have source code available. Other modders can't copy-paste such code, but they can still read it to see which API calls it uses to get things done, and then use those calls themselves in new code. Even if I grant you a special exception to my hypothetical ARR, you'll still need to publish your source to announce your derivative work, thanks to the forums rather than the license, so the code remains available. In effect the forum rules universalize a good portion of the utility of a restrictively-permissive license like the GPL.

[Poodmund]

With regards to the discussion between Snark and Linux above and what I posted... unfortunately it seems quite a few people that have been within the KSP community regard including your mods within mod packs as adhering to the No-Derivatives licensing. Its a contentious grey area; does including an unmodified (but unpackaged) version of your mod within a mod pack still class it within the no-derivatives model, that is a question for the Moderators to ponder?

[linuxgurugamer]

Including a mod in a mod pack where you have unpacked the original mod means that you are going to make a new zip file, which turns it into a derivative, which would mean it's violating the no derivatives license.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, Poodmund said:

 Its a contentious grey area; does including an unmodified (but unpackaged) version of your mod within a mod pack still class it within the no-derivatives model,

That's not exactly grey - it's more as misunderstanding. Everything and anything that change the package itself is a new derivative of the package. The package is the Work, not a mere "medium". The medium is how you got the package.

But you can include the original package (intact) inside your package, and then the user should unpack it himself. Now, your "meta package" is a medium.

From a personal point of view, I would not object this "alternative" interpretation if one can solve this single problem: proof beyound reason doubt that the Work being repacked is in fact the unmodified Work. 

The need to prove that the repacked Works were not modified IN ABSOLUTELY ANY WAY is what makes repacking a problem.

About the politeness, asking the user to ask you about a permission already granted by the license is a License violation itself under some of them: the ones where you are not allowed to impose further limitations. 

Be cautious.

Edited October 11, 2018 by Lisias
false cognates. legalese on foreign language is a beach. =P

[Kerbart]

It’s a situation that resolves itself. “No need for courtesy, only the rules matter.” If that gets applied enough we’ll just see more licenses that requires more permission.

everyone wins. The authors don’t get violated and others don’t have to be polite unnecessarily (just necessarily). Everyone wins! Well except the community as a whole maybe.

[Divstator]

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.