Games from Parallel Realities and non-free/illegal data

[Guus Sliepen]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:28:18AM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:

> Hi Games Packagers,
> 
> Parallel Realities recently clarified the licensing of their
> games' data, which were first believed to be GPL'd:
> 
>   http://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/about/
[...]

At the start of this year, there was already some discussion with the upstream
author and packagers of some other distributions about what assets are
non-free. The problem is that the upstream author used music, sounds, and in
the case of starfighter some graphics, from "free" resources. For example,
modarchive.com was used for some of the music. However, although probably most
resources are in the public domain, some are probably only free for
non-commercial use (which prohibits distribution in main), but there are also
assets for which no copyright information is available, so we cannot distribute
it at all.

The blobwars and blobandconquer packages have already been stripped from sounds
and music.  What I hope is that some people are willing to search or make DFSG
compatible music and sounds for these games, in the spirit of the original
music and sounds.  Maybe sites such as ccmixter.org and simuze.nl can be used
to find CC-BY-SA licensed assets.

> After recently discussing it within the Debian Games team, we're in
> the process of sending removal requests for starfighter and
> viruskiller.  I also copy Guus Sliepen who packaged blob wars so we
> can discuss removal for them too.

It was relatively easy to remove the offending assets and to change the code in
a few places to be able to run without music and sounds.  The blobwars and
blobandconquer packages can work without them, but if you install the original
music and sounds (or replacements with the same filenames) it will use them.
Perhaps this can be done with starfighter as well. In any case, do not ask for
removal of blobwars and blobandconquer!

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
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