Brief Explanation of the licenses

Read this paragraph if you want to have a quick overview of the licensing used by Warsow.
For players:

The first goal of our team is to make a free game for players. This means you will not have to pay for the game, nor pay a monthly cost. You can install our software on many PC as you like, play it as much as you want.

You cannot sell the client/server or gain any profit from it.
For developers:

Code is under GPL license, this means you can get all our source code, study it and reuse it as soon as you keep it open and give back to us your changes.

All artwork, musics, dialogues, stories, names, 3d models, etc... are under a proprietary license. This means you cannot reuse those in any way. If you plan to create another game based on our source code, remember you will have to redo all art,music,models,stories,etc...

A detailed explanation of the licenses follows.
Background and Purpose

In the Warsow Project we have two different licenses:

   1. The first one is GPL. This license is applied to all our source files. You learn more about that license here.
   2. The second one is Warsow Content License. This license is applied to all artwork and texts in this web site and is applied to all art/models/music/texts/names/setting/... present in the game.

It is very important that new developers and the community understand why we have decided to split our efforts among these two licenses, so we encourage you to read it all. If you just want to have a brief explanation jump here.

Chasseur de bots is the name of the Non-Profit Association that holds all copyrights of Warsow assets and is used to run the development team.
Warsow Purpose

The commercial industry does not care too much about Open Source because in most cases the projects are not organized and strong enough to reach their goal and to compete with them. The only way for any of these small OSS projects to succeed is to sacrifice a little of their pride and to join a large and well-organized team. In this way, all talented people can bring their ideas and skills into one project. These talented people will be less responsible for overall project progress, but they can concentrate more on what they really want to do, have more fun and have a much greater chance of success.

Our vision is to convince talented and dedicated people that this is the right path to follow, by focusing on two key objectives: gathering and keeping resources, and maximizing chances of success.

Objective 1: Gathering resources under a single common project is very important to build a strong team. We should try to avoid our project forking into other similar projects, because that means splitting resources and thus, lowering our chances of success. Those other forked projects will repeat efforts already spent on discussion of rules, building new races, writing new code and we will end up again with a lot of resources wasted and no goal reached.

Objective 2: Ensuring success is another key point of our organization. We are trying to preserve the work done by our members as much as we possibly can, with licenses and by adding only talented members to our team. For the project to be successful, it needs to be unique in architecture, rules, music and ideas; it must attract good players and RPG ers and create a fun, stimulating, friendly community. Most importantly, it must be playable and complete.
Why Warsow Is Licensed the Way It Is

To try best to achieve these two goals we have made some tough decisions about licenses. However, in order to explain our conclusion, first it is necessary to examine the alternatives:

Option 1:

    Release absolutely everything under the GPL license. This option sounds great in theory but in practice has the following problems:

        * Anyone can get all of the code and art, music and setting information and start building a similar game with a part of our team. This is sub-optimal because the forked project will split our forces and will lower our chance of success, which is contrary to Objective 1. We need to protect against internal division on the team to keep momentum and stay productive.
        * Anyone can get all of the code and art, music and setting information and start building a similar game with a completely new team. The new project would be similar to Warsow and would destroy much of the uniqueness we are trying to put into the game to make it special.
        *Most artists do not want to release their work to the general public. They fear it will be used in projects or in ways they do not like, so we would lose out on potential artistic contributors joining the project this way, which is against Objective 1.

Option 2:

    Leave the copyrights in the names of the authors of the material. Again, this approach sounds very fair to everyone, but on closer examination has the following problems:

        * A member could decide to leave the team and deny the continued usage of material they had already contributed to Warsow team. This will be a major blow to our progress if he removes many models. We would have to rebuild those from scratch. This scenario would only have to play out several times before our progress and momentum would be slowed measurably and our chances of success reduced, which detracts from Objective 2.

        * If we decide in the future to modify, change, or publish on a website any contributed material, such as a screenshot or preview of the game in action, we would have to get advance permission from all the various copyright holders of each model and each reproduced piece. It is true that he may have already agreed on many aspects, but we could easily face a new scenario (like his art published on the cover of a book or on a press magazine). We already have a list of more than 50 people that have contributed to Warsow so far and it would be really complex or difficult to contact them again if they have left the team. This will hinder our ability to expand or publicize the game and so it is against Objective 2.

        * The author of contributed material could reuse the material for another similar game by simply allowing another project to also access his copyrights, which would hurt the uniqueness of Warsow and increase the chances of forking our team. This also detracts from Objective 2.

Option 3:

    The final (and best) option is to have a proprietary license that will assure past, present and future Warsow Team members that Objectives 1 and 2 are met and that their work will be used for Warsow only.

        * All new contributors (or their legal guardians) are required to review, agree to and sign the Chasseur de bots Contribution License Agreement ( CCB LICENSE ). If the creator of a work wants to contribute that work for inclusion in Warsow, but cannot be bound to the CCB LICENSE, the creator must contact Atomic Blue at info@Warsow.net. With very limited exceptions, only contributors that agree to the CCB LICENSE are eligible for full membership on the Chasseur de bots team (the development team for Warsow) and only materials submitted under the CCB LICENSE will be included in the Warsow game.

        * The submission of materials under the CCB LICENSE gives both the content developers and the Chasseur de bots team assurances that:
              O The materials will only be used in the Warsow game (or its successor games created by Chasseur de bots) and not in any other.
              O The materials, once contributed, will be retained by Chasseur de bots no matter what might happen with other projects, forks, mergers, alliances, and Chasseur de bots will control how it is used.

Explanation of Chasseur de bots Contribution License Agreement

A contributor do not have to be a member of Chasseur de bots (a non-profit association), to submit graphics, rules, code or any other contribution for use in War§sow. However, he is required to agree to the CCB LICENSE, which creates three categories into which submissions are divided, each of which is licensed differently: source code, game rules and all other work.

    *  Source code, other than game rules, are treated as open source software covered by the GNU General Public License, available here http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html with copyright explicitly assigned to Chasseur de bots.

    * Game rules can be scripts, documents, or any other expression in any media. In any of these forms, Game rules are not open source they are the property of Chasseur de bots. You should not submit any game rules unless you agree that they belong to Chasseur de bots and that you will not have the right to use them in any other application.

    * Any other work (such as 2D graphics, 3D models, music and sounds, character descriptions or fantasy world histories) will be the property of Chasseur de bots once you submit it, but you will continue to have the right to display the work as part of a personal portfolio. You are not allowed to display or use the work in another game or application and you are not allowed to use derivative works owned by Chasseur de bots.

Warsow Content License

Assets that are property of Chasseur de bots, use the following Warsow Content License.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USAGE, COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

   1. This License applies to any material or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this Warsow Content License.

   2. Terms defined in this Article, and parenthetically elsewhere, shall throughout this License have the meanings here and there provided. Defined terms may be used in the singular or plural. Definitions:

      • The "Material", below, refers to any such material or work, and a "work based on the Material" means either the Material or any Derivative Work under copyright law.

      • "Derivative Work" shall mean a work containing the Material or a portion of it, such as a revision, modification, enhancement, adaptation, translation (including compilation or recompilation by computer), abridgement, condensation, expansion, or any other form in which such preexisting works may be recast, transformed, or adapted, and that, if prepared without authorization of the owner of the copyright in such preexisting work, would constitute a copyright infringement.

      • Each licensee is addressed as "you".

   3. You may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, sell, participate in the transfer or sale or reproduce, create Derivative Works from, distribute, perform, display or in any way exploit any of the Material released under this License unless expressly permitted by the Warsow Team.

   4. You may freely distribute the Warsow archive/installer unmodified on any media. You may re-compress using different archival formats suitable for your OS (i.e. zip/tgz/rpm/deb/dmg), any changes beyond that require explicit permission of the Chasseur de bots association.

   5. THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE MATERIAL PROVIDED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. THE MATERIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE MATERIAL IS WITH YOU.

   6. IN NO EVENT SHALL Chasseur de bots BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE MATERIAL.


END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS