L, I personally see this thread as nothing more than a clarification of the situation
as it is now. As Ahruman said, the only people who have got a say on a licence for any oxp, or indeed any published piece of software and / or creative work are the people who actually create the work.
Personally, any oxp I've made from scratch (3 of them, yay!) I've no intention of changing the licence for, mainly because I've always intended them, rightly or wrongly, as demos, for others to perhaps take inspiration from.
For the one oxp (Hotrods) that I've created using other people's work as well as my own contributions, the licencing terms were already CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, and I've got no legal or moral right to change those licencing terms.
However, I might well adopt an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives for
portions of it: a future, more complex TigerTurf.js and the yet-to be implemented HotrodTurf.js (wholly independently created scripts that allow for some interesting stuff to happen to the player).
What would that all mean in practice?
1) According to previous statements from you, you want to include unchanged oxps inside OE. Perfect. If the future TigerTurf.js is put unchanged inside OE you can do so without any problem whatsoever. Problem solved. Done.
2) If there are bugs, or incompabilities with another script included inside OE, do bugfix / modify the script, then send the modifications to me for approval & inclusion in a new version of TigerTurf.js / HotrodsTurf.js - Of course I, as the original author, might in turn
modify the OE modifications in order to fit better with the rest of my OXP, or with planned future developments. The thing is, and I feel strongly enough about it to mention this,
there is no obligation on my part to modify my oxp in order to fit better with OE.
This again follows nicely from a few posts of yours where you were talking about people bullying you. You rightly said that no-one had the right to tell you what to do inside your own oxp, and that you won't let yourself be bullied into making changes to your creation based on what someone else says. Very true. By the same token you don't have the right to automatically bully everyone else to make changes to their own work just to help OE along, regardless of what
they want to do. However friendly dialogue, done in the spirit of cooperation & friendship should provide the necessary changes to the original OXP and better mutual understanding. (this is starting to sound like the old COMECON manifesto, but bear with me history buffs)
If the original author disagrees with your assessment, and isn't inclined to make the changes you request, please don't automatically assume there's personal animosity against you. The best thing to do in those cases is to try and see things from their point of view, and see if there's any way to reach a compromise that won't actually go against the original intents of the original OXP maker. Again this should dovetail nicely with the various posts you made about wanting to have more constructive dialogues with people.
3) If you agree to disagree with the original OXP maker, (i.e. me in this hypothetical case), I could grant you a waiver from the No Derivatives clause of the licence. To elaborate: let's say you want the tigers not to attack the player if something else inside OE is happening at a specific time. And let's say I find it unnecessary to do so for my own OXP, and I'm against adding what effectively would be dead code to cater for something else I've no control over. However, let's say that after looking at your changes, I've absolutely no problem with you using them inside OE. In that case I'll grant an explicit waiver for a specific version of OE (wip or not). When a newer version of OE - or of the original OXP - comes along, a new waiver can be issued, provided a new agreement between us can be achieved.
Again, not a problem, since this coincides nicely with what you said you were going to do in any case: notify the original author of any changes made, and wait for their input before going ahead. To clarify further: no real change in planned behaviour required here. The only difference is that the considerate actions you were already planning to do would be actual legal requirements for you to be able to include CC No Derivatives works in OE.
4) In case there's a total breakdown in communications, i.e. the original author feels that the OE modifications would inevitably mangle his/her vision, and you feel you cannot insert their OXP without modifying the No Derivative part of their work, then -
and only then - the only thing to do is either remove that oxp from OSE, or come up with your own intellectual property that provides a reasonable facsimile of what you wanted to include in the first place. If there are previous, Share Alike versions of the OXP you want to include, you could modify those for OE purposes. One thing you won't be able to do is to use a waiver from a previous version of OE to make further changes to the included OXP.
Depending on how exactly the waiver was worded, you might still be able to include the last waived-&-modified OXP in newer versions of OE.
All this seems perfectly reasonabe to me, and since what you said is you are trying to create a collection of OXPs
unchanged from the originals, it souldn't affect either you or OE in the slightest. However I understand that reality might be slightly different from your stated intentions.
The stuff above applies to released OE versions. What about unreleased svn versions of OE? Well, considering that anybody could access the svn repository, you'd have to ask each and every oxp author with a No Derivatives licence for a waiver before putting their work on svn. Again not a problem. IIRC, you were planning to also contact authors of Share Alike works at that stage anyway. As long as they say 'sure, you can use it on svn' you've got your waiver for svn usage. Before releasing OE, you will need to ask for a different waiver, this time to include that modified OXP inside the specific version of OE you plan to release. Of course, coordinating a release is going to take a relatively long time: all the No Derivatives work will need to be waived, and if any part of OE changes between the waive and release, the original author might feel the need to check if this could affect their modified oxp. The best way to handle it is to have a tagged release candidate, and make no changes whatsoever to the code until everybody gives the go ahead. This will involve a lot more collaboration between OE and the original author that is presently the case, and according to what you said before, it sounds like it's something you would welcome!
A final point, if I may. Extending stuff, by making various not-quite-the-same copies of the original,
is a change, and it does seem to fly in the face of OE stated intentions,
as stated by you. Of course, you might want to change OE's stated intentions at any point.
Legal stuff - and legalese in particular - while distasteful to most, has the advantage of helping to clarify things.
When using everyday language it's very easy to come up with stuff that can be interpreted one way or another. Legal language is meant to make implicit (aka common sense) agreements into explicit ones, and to remove any possible ambiguity from the aforementioned explicit agreements.
Much as I dislike the word 'aforementioned', I think we can all do with a dose or two of clarity here!
Ok, rant over! Wow, is that the time? I do get carried away sometimes.
PS: to the best of my understanding the above makes 100% sense if
parts of an OXP are No Derivatives. If the whole of the OXP is No Derivatives, you'd need to get a waiver for point
1). I might still be wrong, and you might still need a waiver for point 1 in any case. Still, that shouldn't be a major problem either, just a matter of contacting the original authors & getting a waiver for each new release.
.
Derivative works means that you take an original piece of art (be it code, graphical, sound, or otherwise) and modify that piece into something new. Like taking a sample from a David Bowie song, adding one note to it to make a new rift. Your work is derived from that of the original author's work. It can stand on it's own, but is derived from it. In this incidence, it would mean taking the source code of Oolite (or one of it's plists, or some other part of it) and modifying it into something new.