dynamic trading system at some point

this sentence no verb

I was thinking about this and someone came to mind, Farcodev. He has been quietly working away creating economic and political models for his 4X game Far Colony. Perhaps he might have some advice?

Which reminds me, I must have a look at his blog to see how he is getting on with the game.

Hi.

I'm working in indie game development studio, we have some successful titles on our account. I saw a big sign on Pioneers page saying "open source space simulation game". I've got a question to you folks.

Does it mean that it would be legal if our company took that pioneer, extend it, add some story line, modern graphic ect. and start selling it on Steam?

Best Regards.

have you looked at what pioneer looks like at the moment? it looks pretty damn epic if you ask me, and the very high settings, you need a pretty high end rig to play this game, due to the fracture generation and other things

the game is still in alpha, but a lot is planned already, there is a lot of chatting in the irc channel that anyone is free to join and join in. everything from missions, to a more dynamic universe, to having fleets and more,, they all been discussed and the direction on which the game is going will outshine the original frontier by miles,

yes there are bugs, yes there are feature requests, and the community of this game is growing, for me personally, Im a new member here but already learnt, (thanks some members) learnt to compile from source so I can run a debbuger, so I can help track down game problems, and have found a few, but Im just one member of many, who is willing to help, the dev community is strong and always open to new ideas

your post sounds like you not really looked at the latest stable build or the bug tracker or even the forum posts

so I think you will find that, you idea of expending the game, adding missions and more, is already been discussed, won't happen for a while, but it will! but things are happening, a new alpha build is released on the second Friday of every month, and each build is getting more added, what's more, the game will is mainly for unix and windows users, but thanks to Philbywhizz, there is a reworked mac installer that might make it into alpha 15

so before you think you can do any better, take a look around the forum and the bug tracker and the release notes of the versions, maybe then you will see, that the game is going to be very big, and a lot, lot better in time

edit

as the game is still in alpha, your probably better off looking else where, you should look at the outerra engine, or a commercial procedural engine, rather then then pioneer

the game is under the GPL licence

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

Pioneer is GPL. Which basically means while it *can* be sold commercially, it is not practical to do so. Bascailly you would be required by law to uphold the GPL licence which means that all works included with pioneer must be released openly in the same way. So yes while you can sell it you also must offer the source material to all works included. Which means literally after 3 customers have bought it, if that many, it would be freely available everywhere.

Pioneer is also heavily inspired by other space-games to the point that a commercial variant would likely be removed by the courts.

So please don't spoil our fun 😉

To say nothing of the fact that Pioneer is no way near ready....

What studio?

Exactly, can you imagine how a certain Cambridge based development company would react if someone released this commercially?....................... 😯

By all means get involved zych and help out if you are willing, but trying to sell the game would only end badly. Actually, it sends me giddy to think how bad it would be. 😕

You should go and read up on the GPL and what it allows - there's many many analyses out there. That basic gist is that you can do what you like with the game, including sell it, but all modifications that you distribute (for cash or not) need to have an offer of source code made available, and you cannot place restrictions on anyone further distributing that source.

The other thing to think about outside of legal obligations is your reputation within the community, which is really the currency of the open source world. If you took Pioneer and made a game out of it without any thought or regard for where it came from, you could sell it without any legal problems (provided you meet your obligations) but you could incur the wrath of nasty internet dwellers that felt they'd been slighted. Channeled appropriately that kind of wrath could kill you. On the other hand, where you to work closely with the community, adding development resources but still working within the same processes then you'd probably find an army of people willing to do free advocacy for your game.

Commercial open source can be tricky, but plenty of other companies have done it with great success. If you're serious about working with us we'd love to have you on board - just like anyone else.

The code is 100% clean so there's no problem there. There might be some stuff ship names or models that look too similar (particularly the "iconic" ones like the Cobra III), but they need removing or improving anyway. I wouldn't be here if I thought this project was legally dubious (though I'm not a lawyer).

Thank you for fast answers.

By the way. As a great and loving fan of Frontier series I wish that project best luck.

I am just a great believer in letting sleeping dogs lie robn. I too agree with you that Pioneer is 100% legit, but still,....I worry what the implications for the project such a commercial move might have if someone did mount a legal challenge, no matter how remote that chance might be. I am thankful to whoever decided to go with a GPL license in the first place, Tomm, JJ, yourself? In the end though, I just don't want to see the project killed off for some stupid legal reason. You have all come so far and achieved so much. I just don't want it to end. Thats honestly what I feel, maybe I am over-reacting 🙄 .

Oh, absolutely - I'm not going to try and stir up trouble. If someone else would like to do that then they're welcome to! I don't think that there will be problems, but of course I can't afford to go to court to prove it.

"I am but a simple man among giants"

The original mac port was done by me and has been around since Alpha 9, all I have done is re-written it and removed all the legacy crap in it. My code is a spec compared to the likes of others (terrains, 3d maths, etc) before me. You give me far too much credit!

😀

Group hug and congrats on the mac port

Hi zych,

I know you've already had a bunch of replies, but I'm going to dip my oar in the water too.

There are already GPL titles on Steam. Id have released some, and there are probably others. While it might seem that there's a distinct lack of a revenue stream if you have to give your game away for free, that's not necessarily the case.

Your changes and improvements must, of course, be given back to the community. That's the fundamental premise of the GPL, the very reason it was written. This is the cost to you of licensing all of our work. We would very likely incorporate many, if not all, of those improvements into the core Pioneer project.

That said, yours would be the one on Steam, and the one with Steam achievements and so on. I don't know what sort of arrangement you could come to with Valve to make sure that you're the only studio releasing Pioneer on Steam, but if you were the first, then you'd remain the popular one. People want their achievements to be seen, and if your price is reasonable, they'll buy your edition in order to make those achievements.

Of course, the source you distribute must be the source that actually built the Steam edition, which might cause you some interesting problems.

GNU wrote the license, and own its copyright. Their (lengthy) FAQ on the subject is here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Good luck. Releasing a GPL title through a DRM system, where you don't own the rights to dual license that title, probably hasn't been done before. I suspect it's possible, although it might not be profitable. I'd love to see it happen!

Brianetta:

Please will you just leave that bloody horse alone.....

NEVER HAPPEN!

And please have some respect for the commuinity here can you? The devs and contributors don't do this so you or anyone else can take an idea to Steam..... Dont you see that? Jesus.... All your doing is stirring up trouble and reducing motivation its not productive.

Yeah Im probably over-racting, don't get me wrong Brian, we love you here 🙂 Just forget about the money, its for the luuurvvv 😉

Huh? Commercial potential is a great thing. Someone working full time (well, part time is maybe more common for indie games) is able to do so much more than hobbyists doing a hour here and there. And since any engine improvements made are under GPL we can pull them right back into Pioneer.

There are indeed a bunch of GPLd titles on Steam (although they are all titles opensourced well after release?) and similarly many commercial re-releases of DOS games use a product from the open-source community - DOSbox.

Realistically I wouldn't think that anyone would sell Pioneer - it's too much like Frontier unsurprisingly - but a different game built on the same technology.

Luomu, I wouldn't take the outburst too seriously - it made me laugh, which was probably the intention.

There are GPL titles on Steam, but I'm not sure that there are any that are solely GPL. I would suspect that all the GPL titles on Steam right now are published on Steam by the copyright owner, who has the right to license it under another license as well as the GPL. This means that (for Pioneer) it's the GPL version, for which source code must be made available, which will be on Steam, including any Steam libraries, application IDs and so forth required to make it work (this being GPL3).

Pioneer can't be re-licensed or dual licensed without the consent of everybody who owns it. The Git repo alone has 32 contributors listed (some of whom are duplicates), and that's not even including many of the artists and coders who had their work committed by the dev team, or the owners of source code that was taken from other GPL projects. Basically, it's GPL to the end.

So, while I'd love to see Pioneer on Steam, I don't think it'll turn out to be practical or profitable. Never mind, eh?

How the hell can a dead horse talk anyway?

I'd be more interested in how a living one could talk...

A bit of humour yes, but also I do feel you like to fixate on the commercial side of Pioneer when we should just forget about that altogether, I don't personally see how it could ever be good, so if you don't mind could you walk me through that? Or at least an example for me to get my head around....

WRT steam and dosbox... Yes steam use dosbox, but yes many people consider it to be pretty dishonest, just check out the dosbox forums, you will have about an even split of those who are pretty apathetic towards the situation and those who think its out of order...

It's not a fixation, it's just a refusal to rule it out. Unlike non-commercial licenses, such as some of the Creative Commons, the GPL allows software to be used for any purpose, including getting rich, subjugating citizens, controlling missile launch systems, exterminating pandas and any other unsavoury activity. Of all the possible uses of software, making money is not the most nefarious by quite a margin.

If some commercial house does try to get Pioneer into a box and into a shop, I'm happy to get the exposure. If they actually want to pay their staff to contribute to it, that's even better. I'm not going to discourage it, and if somebody who's unfamiliar with GPL in the commercial world asks about it (like they did here), I'm not going to tell them not to try.

Yeah, it's not really a good example at all since it's just commercial use of an open-source software, not modified in any way so publishers are not obligated to contribute anything (they could at least donate to the project but I don't believe they have done that - no sense doing it secretly when you can get some PR/goodwill out of it). I would be surprised if DB *developers* are unhappy about it - they picked the license after all.

btw I read "commercial house" as "commercial horse"...

...amazing, how do you know what I do at the weekends? 😆

Everyone else has covered pretty much all of the other angles so I'll just give my own.

You're first problems are going to be the licensing agreements for any other APIs which you might want to use, things like FMOD audio libs for example or Bink video playback blah blah blah... actually no I apologise, your FIRST real problem is getting your lawyers to stop bawling their fists into their eye-sockets to hold back the tears it seems to be unreasonably hard to find a lawyer that will even let you use GPL code in our TOOLS, it's completely forbidden in production code 😕

I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone forking the whole codebase and going nuts making a game based on it. The way that the Quake engines worked for example is that the code is GPL'd but the art assets are still copyrighted. Which would be one way of working, then we could also pull back from your work any source code changes we wanted (because you'd be legally obligate to release them) but the scripts and data assets like spaceships etc would all be copyrighted over to you guys (if you wanted).

It's a tricky road to walk though.

Well, I think this horse is thoroughly dead now 😀

Andy

Almost, Im jumping on for one last ride....

Yeah after some discussion on IRC it was pointed out to me that it could be a good thing, if that indeed did happen.. However, I have never seen this happen and in my experience have only seen the bad side. IE person comes in forks project, makes changes does not commit them to project, sells the package and does not publicly release the source code. Or.. comes in, does not contribute, does not commit, does not write code, sells it and makes money uner a different name. There are so many examples of both of these situation, but does anyone have an example of when it actually works? IE company appears, forks project, commits their changes into the main repository, changes are pulled into project..... they sell their 'product' however they adhere to the law.

So bad examples:

Dosbox, Dosbox, Dosbox... 3 times because there are at least 3 version on-sale which do not contribute to the project, not to mention the differently named ebay knock-offs.

Numerous emulators on the android market place.

Blender, someone is actually selling blender under a different name for quite a lot of cash...

Celestia, resold and re-named by a non-contributor.

Ok so yeah while the law says things have to be done a certain way, I think we aren't all that naive to actually believe that people will adhere to it are we?

Its taken Google over two years to remove naughty apps.... two years of clean sales.

There are laws and there are laws 🙂