cybersphinx wrote:
About the non-commercial usage thing: It not only prohibits a company selling Warzone, but Linux Distributors selling their distro to include the music.
that's a grey area... linux distributors, while perfectly welcome to sell linux (and of course the source code that goes with all the gpl software), generally only charge for two (if any) things: the cost of packaging/shipping for on-the-shelf copies, and prepaid tech support contracts. any distros following that trend have no legal encumberance to including
music which is free for non-commercial use.
those distributors who sell gpl software for profit cannot, as you say, include the
music on the distribution media (though they can put the
music on a public ftp server to grab it from during installation, for example). however, almost everyone who uses gpl software in large quantities (as in the case of linux) knows that there's no point in paying for that software when you can get it free elsewhere, and thus such distributions are
extremely unpopular amongst the initiated. the only time gpl software is really successfully sold is during the conversion from closed to open source, at which point the owner might sell it to "the community" for a large sum.
in the end, even without the
music being available for commercial use, anyone who is able to distribute warzone at all has a fairly low bar to entry for providing or retrieving the
music in some way. that said, i'm not opposed to the commercial-use allowance (especially since i have no
music of my own), but i'd like to hear a definite situation where allowing commercial use really improves the distribution potential of the
music while still keeping it out of greedy hands.
and to clarify, are we considering the rights to "redistribute in drm-encumbered form" and "reuse in non-free games" to be part of "commercial use"?
