Factory Render

[MaNGusT]

Laws don't work that way.

What is the problem with using the screenshot which was made on the engine which is free for noncommercial use? sometimes you are so paranoiac about licensing.... :-S

[Zarel]

What is the problem with using the screenshot which was made on the engine which is free for noncommercial use? sometimes you are so paranoiac about licensing.... :-S

Because distributing it under the GPL doesn't count as noncommercial use.

Again, it's not the engine that's the problem (copyright of an engine doesn't apply to screenshots of its output, else Adobe would own everything you make with Photoshop), it's the models and textures.

[MaNGusT]

...

Why do you worry about copyright? This project is free, we aren't going to sell the game. Models and textures which UT3 engine sdk includes are free for noncommercial use also. Do you think that Epic Games worries about the one screenshot which was made for the free open source project?

We can mark the screenshot with UT3 engine label...

[Zarel]

Why do you worry about copyright? This project is free, we aren't going to sell the game. Models and textures which UT3 engine sdk includes are free for noncommercial use also. Do you think that Epic Games worries about the one screenshot which was made for the free open source project?

Ignoring all the philosophical issues, there's a simple issue:

1. Warzone is GPL. Pumpkin released it as GPL, so there's nothing we can do about it.
2. The GPL forces everything that touches it to be GPL-licensed as well.
3. The GPL license allows commercial use, so anything with a non-commercial license cannot be GPL.

In other words, even if the developers didn't care about having an open game (and we do care), no matter what we do, it'd simply be outright illegal to include a render that has non-commercial licensed intellectual property in it.

Okay, so what if we just do it illegally, and hope no one sues us? Even if no one sues us, suddenly, we get rejected from Debian and nearly all other Linux software repositories, since we're no longer using an OSI/DFSG-approved license. We'd lose the wz2100.net domain, since Kamaze isn't going to accept illegal material on his website (and if I were he, neither would I). We'd lose the SourceForge repository, since SourceForge is going to drop us on the spot once they learn that we're using illegal material, and we'd lose the vast support network we have simply by being open-source software (including pretty much all our developers, including myself). So we'd be left with... pretty much nothing.

Not to mention that "hope no one sues us" can be an unreliable strategy - witness all the other projects that have tried that strategy and used other companies' intellectual property, hoping that they wouldn't care since it was "just a fan project" and "nonprofit" and "free advertising for them" and all that, and then gotten sued.

And that's just the pragmatic issues. Morally, I just don't want non-open-source-compatible IP in Warzone, and from what I know of the other developers, the same is true of literally all of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have the render in the game as much as you do. It looks great, and it really captures the essence of what a Warzone factory should look like, and it makes me really sorry that we can't have it in-game. It's just unfortunate that, whether or not you agree with those laws, the fact is that the laws don't work that way.

We can mark the screenshot with UT3 engine label...

Again, the problem isn't the engine, and neither is it attribution - the problem is the GPL-incompatible license of the models and textures.

[Tenoh]

So why not use it in a mod?

[Zarel]

So why not use it in a mod?

Feel free.