Mod licensing and "etiquette"

[Galileo]

1 minute ago, Lisias said:

The best single thing that can happen to you is some people trying the competition, and then coming back to you.

He changed nothing! It was a recompile! That could break things for users. Careers people may have had for months. And before you go on about making backups, understand that not everyone thinks ahead like that.

[B15hop]

17 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Every single mod that was "updated" by RBT was in active development over the last 30 days. Impatience at its finest.

Create a pull request and move on and be patient. If you update it for yourself, so be it. Releasing it to everyone, historically on these forums, has not been good for the end user, and especially not good to the original devs. 

Scatterer hasn't been updated since March. Again am I missing something? lol.. It's a core component for the things I love in this game..

[Galileo]

Just now, B15hop said:

Scatterer hasn't been updated since March. Again am I missing something? lol.. It's a core component for the things I love in this game..

A released update is not the same as in development.

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, Galileo said:

He changed nothing! It was a recompile! That could break things for users. Careers people may have had for months. And before you go on about making backups, understand that not everyone thinks ahead like that.

Focus on what you are doing right, and not about what the other guy is doing.

Again, trust your users. The faithful ones don't need your care, and the unfaithful ones need to learn why they should trust you more.

And everybody got to learn sometime, and they will reach there by trying and borking and messing. Most of the ones that will try will fail, but ALL the ones that won't try, will fail.

Not you, not me, neither anyone will be around forever. Sooner or later, we will be gone, and who will be left behind to keep things going? We are not allowed to cherry pick people on open source, we must embrace what we get, and we will not get anyone by preventing them to even try.

Please understand that this is not an argument against Forum Policies, this is absolutely out of the question.

"If you love somebody, if you love someone… Set them free" — Sting

Edited October 20, 2019 by Lisias
Yeah. I was meaning trust. =D

[B15hop]

11 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Focus on what you are doing right, and not about what the other guy is doing.

Again, thrust your users. The faithful ones don't need your care, and the unfaithful ones need to learn why they should thrust you more.

And everybody got to learn sometime, and they will reach there by trying and borking and messing. Most of the ones that will try will fail, but ALL the ones that won't try, will fail.

Not you, not me, neither anyone will be around forever. Sooner or later, we will be gone, and who will be left behind to keep things going? We are not allowed to cherry pick people on open source, we must embrace what we get, and we will not get anyone by preventing them to even try.

Please understand that this is not an argument against Forum Policies, this is absolutely out of the question.

"If you love somebody, if you love someone… Set them free" — Sting

All this "Thrusting" is turning me on.. https://giphy.com/gifs/reaction-snl-saturday-night-live-oKLRltwrpU3oQ

lol.. Sorry, I had to.. But I love your sentiment.

PS: You meant "trust" I think.

Edited October 19, 2019 by B15hop

[Lisias]

9 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Lisias's suggestions regarding appending local version strings are good ones, but I fear there are still too many users who won't bother reading any of it.

People need to be educated. But they will never be educated if we prevent the situations where they could be educated.

It's a pain in the SAS? Yes, it is. But yet, we still need to educate the users. Most of them ends up turning themselves on excellent supporters, once you explain to them how things should work, and what things should be avoided to prevent things to stop working.

[Galileo]

13 minutes ago, B15hop said:

This was supposed to be @Lisias Quote but doing this on mobile so counter intuitive.

And everybody got to learn sometime, and they will reach there by trying and borking and messing. Most of the ones that will try will fail, but ALL the ones that won't try, will fail.

Not you, not me, neither anyone will be around forever. Sooner or later, we will be gone, and who will be left behind to keep things going? We are not allowed to cherry pick people on open source, we must embrace what we get, and we will not get anyone by preventing them to even try.

I think you are arguing something very different than the issue at hand. And I agree with you. Yes, please learn from others work. I am not saying that you can't do that. And in the case that a mod becomes inactive for a very long time, then there will be an opportunity to continue it. But this is not what the issue at hand is. 

Edited October 19, 2019 by Galileo

[B15hop]

1 minute ago, Galileo said:

I think you are arguing something very different than the issue at hand. And I agree with you. Yes, please learn from others work. I am not saying that you can't do that. And in the case that a mod becomes inactive for a very long time, then there will be an opportunity to continue it. But this is not what the issue at hand is. 

Hey, I didn't say that.. lol. I understand your concern Galileo and it is a valid one in my opinion.

Updating active MODS seems like a bad idea.. I meant if you want to do it and send it to a few friends, cool perhaps..

But going onto the main sites and posting is as a WIP. Not so much..lol

[Galileo]

1 minute ago, B15hop said:

Hey, I didn't say that.. lol. I understand your concern Galileo and it is a valid one in my opinion.

Updating active MODS seems like a bad idea.. I meant if you want to do it and send it to a few friends, cool perhaps..

But going onto the main sites and posting is as a WIP. Not so much..lol

Oh sorry I meant to quote lisias!!

[Lisias]

1 minute ago, Galileo said:

I think you are arguing something very different than the issue at hand. And I agree with you. Yes, please learn from others work. I am not saying that you can't do that. And in the case that a mod becomes inactive for a very long time, then there will be an opportunity to continue it. But this is not what the issue at hand is. 

Yep. And now, we have a new guy that spent a lot of effort (easy for us, but for who is learning, not that much!), and he now knows better.

And a lot of people are learning too, and the next one will probably try better - and perhaps fail in a new way, but again, it's an improvement.

Yes, there're problems on this approach. We need to identify them and tackle them down somehow, something that would make things safer for the ones willing to start to get their dirty pawns dirtier, without messing up the ones that already have them dirty enough.

[B15hop]

Just now, Galileo said:

Oh sorry I meant to quote lisias!!

lol.. All good buddy.. Seriously though. No hard feelings..  Cheers to you and I have to say I've only been into modding this for a week or so but I saw some of the work you did and it is exemplary. I might have to try that.. And donate.

[Galileo]

1 minute ago, B15hop said:

lol.. All good buddy.. Seriously though. No hard feelings..  Cheers to you and I have to say I've only been into modding this for a week or so but I saw some of the work you did and it is exemplary. I might have to try that.. And donate.

Don't worry about donating. I dont know why I even have donation links up. I do this for fun not money. Donations don't motivate me but the thought is appreciated! So thanks!

[Stone Blue]

1 hour ago, B15hop said:

Scatterer hasn't been updated since March. Again am I missing something? lol.. It's a core component for the things I love in this game..

Yes, you are missing something... First, if you knew how to look, there was a commit made to a non-master branch as recent as July 21...
Mod devs have real lives, and most make mods as a hobby in their spare time.

Also, first off, tho i quoted you, and I say *you* below, I am NOT specifically pointing *you* out... By my usage below, *you* is in general for anyone who decides to release a fork or copy of a mod that is still active, in development, or still *wanted* by the mod dev. This is where it becomes important to try to contact the dev, and get their blessing, *whether its legal or not*... and if they say they are still interested in *owning* the mod, and dont want you to release anything, then mebbe their wishes should be followed, and the matter dropped.

They are *nice* enuff to provide them publicly for others to use... for *FREE*...
*THEY* give you something that *you* have to put little effort into using, while it *COSTS* them time and effort, and sometimes stress, to dev the mod, test the mod, make a thread, get the mod hosted, listen to the constant requests to put it on CKAN, listen to the constant requests for updates, sift thru the constant bug reports (which are many times unfounded/unreproducable, reported incorrectly or without evidence, or are the cause of someone simply being lazy and not reading and following the install instructions.

Then throw in all the other nagging and complaining, the requests for "...could you do *this*...", and all the other drama the eventually rears its ugly head...

And then, while mebbe absolutely legal, someone entitled and impatient comes along, and basically says (paraphrasing here),
"Hey, KSP just updated a few hours ago, you havent released an update in over a whole month, and I'm not gonna wait for you, I'm just gonna take over your mod, change it and do what *I* want with it, even tho it will conflict with, mebbe break your mod, mebbe cause problems for your users, and most certainly cause you distress and maybe even make you angry or decide its just not worth it anymoar, and cause you to say enuff is enuff, and just quit modding altogether, leave the community, and take *all* your mods with you (if you offer moar than one mod to the community)."

THEN who suffers?... not *you*, who have just *legally* committed a hostile takeover... *but the rest of the community, not to mention the personal stress you've just committed on the mod dev*

Here's an IRL example:
You stand across the street everyday, from a local foodbank and shelter, that supplies *free* food and shelter to everyone in the community who wants it. Not just in one location, but several around the city. Everyday, you use a loudspeaker to complain to the owners and everyone partaking of their services, that their food is second -rate and tastes terrible. You complain their shelter is not warm enuff, or that they dont offer enuff beds, or that their showers are not clean enuff...
Then others stand with you and and complain loudly as well...
All the while, you do this *legally*... Which puts the onus on the shelter owners to pursue and pay for, at cost to them, legal action against you...
They lose, because what you are doing is legal...
So they say enuff is enuff, and close *all* their shelters...

Then you, move in and take over the this one shelter, and you decide you want to limit the hours the shelter is open, offer moar beds, but with limitations to who can stay in them...
Your food ends up being worse than the people before you... Your showers get cleaned less often...Then people start complaining *your* version of the shelter is worse than the one before... You decide its not worth the effort to keep this shelter open, so you close it...
*OR*, maybe you do make this one shelter better... but in any case, you've managed to shut down *all* the other, previous shelters...

In either case, overall, the whole community is worse off...

My point in this far-fetched, tho possible scenario, is that *just because something is legal and you **CAN** do it... doesnt mean you **SHOULD** do it...*

Edited October 19, 2019 by Stone Blue

[steve_v]

43 minutes ago, Lisias said:

People need to be educated. But they will never be educated if we prevent the situations where they could be educated.

Oh I agree, but I don't think it's my place to reassign J. Random modder to educational duties, especially on such short notice.

I wish every developer had the time to teach their users to be constructive community members, that's right at the core of software freedom. Sadly they often don't, and the last thing we need here is modders getting burned out trying.

We've all seen the "Halp naow plz gmae is broke" threads that contain only a screenshot of the loading screen, because the user didn't do even a cursory search before bleating.
Unfortunately that is the level of some users who will come and mess up a modders day with reports against unsupported, unofficial, or obviously incompatible versions. Nobody wants it, but it has happened before and I expect it will keep on happening despite the best intentions.

 

43 minutes ago, Lisias said:

It's a pain in the SAS? Yes, it is. But yet, we still need to educate the users.

I agree absolutely with your sentiment, and if I were the mod author in question I'd be all over it, teaching users how to fix stuff for themselves and generally mess with my code.
For me, as you say, it's worth the pain.
I don't think it's fair to impose that pain on others though, especially when they are already working for free with extremely limited manpower. If a someone says he doesn't want the potential hassle, that's fine by me.

Edited October 19, 2019 by steve_v

[Lisias]

11 minutes ago, steve_v said:

For me, as you say, it's worth the pain.
I don't think it's fair to impose that pain on others though, especially when they are already working for free with extremely limited manpower. If a someone says he doesn't want the potential hassle, that's fine by me.

You weren't around on the last 6 months of TweakScale releases, were you???    

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, Lisias said:

You weren't around on the last 6 months of TweakScale releases, were you?

Not really TBH. As much as I respect your work on that mod it's not one I have ever really had a use for, so I haven't been following the thread.
I haven't played much KSP in the last 6 months either, as my playstyle is aeroplane heavy and both landing-gear and joysticks have been borked for at least that long. Back to see what's going on since I heard rumours that at least one of those is finally fixed.

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, Stone Blue said:

My point in this far-fetched, tho possible scenario, is that *just because something is legal and you **CAN** do it... doesnt mean you **SHOULD** do it...*

It's true. But it will be done the same way. The choice you can make is to decide if it will be done with you looking on, or by your back.

People tend to respect people when they feel respected. Try to explain an user why his/her friend is not allowed to try to fix a problem for him/her on the Forum - and when failing on it, watch them going away to do exactly "what they should not do" somewhere else. You push people away enough, they will go away indeed. Reddit, Steam, and I'm seeing a lot of movement on some KSP related Chinese sites - some of them are doing a pretty decent work on cataloguing the Add'On Scene, by the way.

We must reach a compromise - otherwise they will eventually leave us. Be due someone learning how to do things [without us], and providing a better service out there, be due Authors leaving the scene without finding someone good to be in charge, and them users will go away the same way.

10 hours ago, steve_v said:

as my playstyle is aeroplane heavy and both landing-gear and joysticks have been borked for at least that long.

Shameless advertising: The beta for TweakScale 2.5.0.0 (see issue #42 on the github) is scaling wheels and apparently is working fine - my "production" savegames are on 2.5.0.0 anyway, and the scaled wheels and landing struts are holding. You will bork on scaling wheels down, however, as scaled down wheels are being correctly scaled too, and then, became weaker.

About the Joysticks, well… I can't help on this (at least, for now).

Edited October 20, 2019 by Lisias
Had to fix some phrasing.

[steve_v]

6 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Shameless advertising: The beta for TweakScale 2.5.0.0 (see issue #42 on the github) is scaling wheels and apparently is working fine - my "production" savegames are on 2.5.0.0 anyway, and the scaled wheels and landing struts are holding.

As cool as that is, size isn't my problem, it's the unpredictable and violent bounciness that keeps griefing me.
 

9 minutes ago, Lisias said:

About the Joysticks, well… I can't help on this (at least, for now).

Well apparently unity has finally fixed it, and we get the fix in KSP1.8.
I never really wanted a mod to sort it out anyway, and there is one already - I just wanted Squad to own the regression they shipped and make some effort to deal with it. Input support is the game engine's job.

[panarchist]

On 10/4/2019 at 3:50 PM, Lisias said:

Not exactly:

Source: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

Since everything Walt Disney did, he did before 1978 (he died on 1966), Disney (the Company) is able to renew the copyrights using the USA legal system.

Everything from 1978 to nowadays are subjected to the author's death + 70 years, no renewal. At least on USA, obviously.

Yes, exactly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Since 1990, Disney has been the main driver of Copyright extensions, to prevent Mickey from falling into public domain. (although he'd still fall under Trademark law) @DStaal is right, though, that Disney wasn't behind the most recent Copyright extension attempt.

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, panarchist said:

Yes, exactly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Since 1990, Disney has been the main driver of Copyright extensions, to prevent Mickey from falling into public domain. (although he'd still fall under Trademark law) @DStaal is right, though, that Disney wasn't behind the most recent Copyright extension attempt.

Not exactly!

To tell you the true, it is. What changed is that Disney didn't requested the extension, so unless something else happened, some Disney copyrights expires this year. I remember someone above talking about this, by the way. I will redact this later to credit the guy (can't really use this crappy excuse of a mobile I'm on now).

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/

— — post edit — — 

Found it. It was DStaal on this post:

 

Edited October 20, 2019 by Lisias
found it

[severedsolo]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

Well apparently unity has finally fixed it, and we get the fix in KSP1.8.
I never really wanted a mod to sort it out anyway, and there is one already - I just wanted Squad to own the regression they shipped and make some effort to deal with it. Input support is the game engine's job.

 Just uh, don't try to scroll your mouse wheel. https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/23909

[R-T-B]

3 hours ago, Galileo said:

He changed nothing! It was a recompile! That could break things for users. Careers people may have had for months. And before you go on about making backups, understand that not everyone thinks ahead like that.

You are wrong.  Scatterer had fixes.

 

I am removing the repo but it was not a straight recompile.  Please see my other thread later, but in terms of ettiquite, my goal was to become a testing branch of sort for mods so I could help you guys update.  Sorry I communicated so badly.  I will be in touch with all of you in the future before I do anything further, but I assure you the idea for all those subprojects was to help the global community, and not just the users:  devs too.

Just going to leave this here as proof, lot more if I could scroll:

[steve_v]

3 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

 Just uh, don't try to scroll your mouse wheel. https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/23909

You mean https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/23904? That one gets this months prize for "most ridiculous 0-day bug to get past QA".
This just confirms my long-held suspicion that Squad doesn't bother to QA the GNU/Linux builds at all.
I really can't see how anyone could do even a cursory playtest without touching the scrollwheel.

[severedsolo]

Just now, steve_v said:

You mean https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/23904? That one gets this months prize for "most ridiculous 0-day bug to get past QA".
This just confirms my long-held suspicion that Squad doesn't bother to QA the GNU/Linux builds at all.
I really can't see how anyone could do even a cursory playtest without touching the scrollwheel.

Oh yeah, that is what I meant - my bad. I discovered that within 2 minutes of loading the game. Anyway, I'll shut up before this goes off topic.

[Galileo]

3 minutes ago, R-T-B said:

You are wrong.  Scatterer had fixes.

 

I am removing the repo but it was not a straight recompile.  Please see my other thread later, but in terms of ettiquite, my goal was to become a testing branch of sort for mods so I could help you guys update.  Sorry I communicated so badly.  I will be in touch with all of you in the future before I do anything further, but I assure you the idea for all those subprojects was to help the global community, and not just the users:  devs too.

Just going to leave this here as proof, lot more if I could scroll:

I was talking in regards to Kopernicus