Nexuiz artwork license?

[Psychcf]

There's been some discussion about licensing the art in nexuiz under CC, but CC is not compatable with the GPL. I'm wondering if maybe the Artistic License 2.0, which appears to be GPL compatable, would be more appropriate.

[leileilol]

No

Any other license would discourage the freedom to continue and maintain the artwork and its source

[Psychcf]

ok, now I see that

anyways I wonder what other licenses are available for artwork, maybe we could find one to use...

[divVerent]

Not for Nexuiz, as its artwork HAS to be GPL compatible so it can be "linked" to a complete work (IMHO that's what the PK3 is doing). Only possible artwork licenses would be licenses that are compatible to the GPL by a conversion clause or by inclusion; e.g. one COULD use the MIT (X11) license as it allows doing about everything with it when just mentioning the original author, including changing the license to GPL.

Why are you thinking about using anything other than the GPL anyway? Do you want it to be even more restrictive? GPL is basically equivalent to CC Attribution-Share Alike, when applied to mere data (that is, artwork without any "source"). Only problem is that CC Attribution-Share Alike requires derived works to be CC Attribution-Share Alike licensed, while the GPL requires derived works to be GPL licensed - and that alone makes them incompatible. And this difference is IMHO quite vital for Nexuiz, as it means that nobody can take out Nexuiz data and use it in his own project without asking the original author, unless his project is GPL licensed too (which means, its CODE). If the game were CC Share-Alike, he'd just need to apply THAT to his code, which still allows him to make a binary-only closed source game (at least it would need to be freeware, though).

So basically, what we CAN do is use a LESS restrictive license than GPL - but if it is right what I read from artists, they'd want it to be in a MORE restrictive license, like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (nobody may change it, commercial redistribution forbidden). Artists hate freedom, apparently, they want nobody to change their works. And I can actually understand them, as quite some people would abuse their works - but such media won't ever be possible in a free software game.

Actually, if the Nexuiz contributors would agree, we could dual license the content to CC Attribution-Share Alike and GPL, and actually "use" the GPL in Nexuiz. These two licenses basically have the same spirit from an artist's point of view: it is free to redistribute, and modifications are allowed if they preserve that freedom. However, a dual licensed model is much harder to understand for new artists than just one license, and if it's just one, it probably must be the GPL.

Now... to the "Noncommercial" ones. Nexuiz actually already has commercial redistribution, so all content must allow that. It's for example packaged on Linux distribution DVDs, and the GPL even allows you to sell a Nexuiz CD for any price you like. The buyer would of course be entitled to give it away for free, which would make selling just the game quite pointless - but it is allowed to make stuff like distributions possible. And we all want Nexuiz to stay in the package repositories of Linux distributions, since it gives us some "advertising" for free (people then can find the game by just browsing the list of installable packages for games).