Oolite Bulletins

LittleBear wrote:

This is not the Oolite Way!!!!

You got no argument from me there. As ISTR it was you that countered MadMax's claims of copyright infringement, so Sung was, if not over-reacting, down-right out of order for inferring anything like you were trying to steal his thunder.

Oolite is about sharing; ideas, projects, OXP's, experience, all of it. Maybe there should be a sticky to remind newcomers and old hands alike.

Captain Hesperus

Sung's within his rights. From the moment his work took tangible form, he owned copyright. Without his explicit permission, none of use have any right to do anything with his work. It inherits nothing from the Oolite license, because it is not derrived from it. He has the right to be identified as the creator of his work, and he has the sole copyright unless he licenses it to others. Some might take his publishing it here as implicit permission, but that's clearly been clarified by Sung.

It being an OXP doesn't give anybody any further rights to it. Using a standard drawn up by Giles doesn't make it "really his" any more than Oolite "really belongs to Brad Cox and Tom Love" because it was written in Objective C.

Sung's work is first rate. Personally, I'm going to miss it terribly, but I have to respect the fact that it doesn't belong to me.

Captain Hesperus wrote:

LittleBear wrote:

This is not the Oolite Way!!!!

I certainly agree. This fighting is tearing this community apart, and I think that we need to move on. Already, we have lost two talented members, and if we keep on, we are bound to lose more.

When I first made my claims of copyright infringement, I had no idea that it would lead to all of this, and I apologize for any harm that I might have inflicted. I did this for what I believed to be the good of the Oolite community, like I have explained in the "Statement" thread. However, I honestly have to continue to stand by my claims, because, although I hate to rehash this, I have screenshots to prove my point, which I can post in the "Statement" thread, if anyone so desires.

I was certainly not trying to drive away Sung, and I think that he understood this when he agreed to remove HW2 influences from his artwork, which I still believe to be of a very high quality. Because of this, I will not post these screenshots unless I am asked to, through either a forum post or a private message.

@Brianetta: Yes, Sung is within his rights, with the possible (not definite) exception of the HW2 issues. But, I also feel that he should have clarified his stance on copyright from the very beginning (this issue was not even referenced until page 9). Also, if this was clarified on his website (which can be reached in the link in his signature), it needs to be in English (a language which Sung understands), as these forums are in English, and there is no reasonable expectation of being able to read German here.

Ahruman wrote:

Sung’s reactions seem a bit strong – more so, perhaps, because of language problems – but he’s not the only one. Let’s all try to calm down a bit before making any life/ooniverse-altering decisions.

I agree with Ahruman here.

Sung is clearly a talented artist and very protective of his work (like most artists). He was hurt by some undue criticism towards his work when he started to work on his textures, then the suspicion of copyright infringement etc. One's skin gets thinner in such dealings...

On the other hand, his reactions were a bit stronger than one would have expected from someone showing his work to a bunch of unknown people (certain portion of them will always be critical - you can never please them all). Also, Sung did not seem to have taken a closer look at how the community works (with Giles and some other people being missing, Oosat semi-functional) and I'm not sure he understood the concept of OXPs too well.

And of course the language issues. When one doesn't have a complete grasp of a foreign language, certain nuances and details may, and will, be missed. The unspoken rule of netiquette is to give some leeway to other people, some benefit of a doubt to other discussants in order to deal with most unnecessary misunderstandings and clashes between people that are due to language barriers. I think that this rule was broken in this thread by more than one people.

But, the end result is that a conflict occurred. There's nothing we can do to change things back the way they were, but at least we can admit that what happened was not something that we like to see happening. We want to avoid such things in the future.

I don't have any wise advice on how to do that, however...

LittleBear wrote:

This is not the Oolite Way!!!!

I personally think the only reason somebody should submit work to the Oolite community is because they want to give something back to all the people that have invested time and effort to get Oolite to it's present state.

@This entire discussion.

If Giles and Murgh et. al. had reacted just vaguely as possessive as Sung when I started out toying with the game by putting some decals on some of their work and making it available, I'd have left the community immediately and never looked back.

I don't think that Sungs textures should be available at all if we risk to have new budding oxp'ers scared away by having poured a load of shit over them for toying with those textures.

To me the spirit of Oolite is that you steal freely but remember to credit. If I'm wrong here please say so and I shall withdraw what I've released because it's all really the work of Giles in the end.

If Sung wants to advertise within the framework of Oolite I suggest that he submits a "Sung is great" ad for yah. If he wants to use Oolite as a vehicle for promoting his career as an artist I think that he should find another game for that project.

I think this was just a one-off misunderstanding, and it seems to me that everyone but Sung is perfectly happy with way Oolite and OXP-ing works, so let's just carry on as we were In the saga of Oolite, it's an interesting footnote, but ultimately of little consequence...

@Dr Nil:
I quite agree

I feel there are possibly two not entirely compatibale views going on here:

-Sung has done these textures & clearly feels they are his intellectual property, and so can dictate 'terms of use'.
Concerns about what B&B may think of this aside, Sung is quite correct as far as I understand such things.

-It seems the prevailing view in the 'Oolite community' is all submissions are entirely free to general use & reinterpretation by the community.
This is a position I am very happy to support, but I suspect is not enforceable...

Having never run a BB I don't know if such a suggestion is practicable, but I wonder if as suggested by others that there be a 'sticky' for forum rules.
Better still an automated pm to all new members welcoming them first, but also making it plain our own 'terms of use'.
ie:
-'All property is theft'.
-'Beyond credit for submissions ( NOT to be strictly enforced ) everything is open to the community @ large to do with whatever they please'.
-'No submission may be associated with any potential commercial endeavour. ( except by general agreement, or at least the go-ahead of one of the moderators)'
etc...
In short: It's all for the Oolite community.

I would hope the Oolite community will continue to grow & as it does I suspect this issue will come up again & again as people join who will understandibly play by 'the rules' as the wider world sees them rather than as this BB may wish them to be...

*Edit*
Sorry Roberto - posting @ the same time. I'm sure you are quite correct - this is a mis-understanding. My above suggestion(s) are one possible way for avoiding such situations in the future.

jeez....i'm off for a day and teh Community just about falls apart

i understand Sung's miff at having the name taken off, i hope he just overreacted due to language probs. i do art myself, have a site (where my oxp is) and browsing google i found a shed load of my images were on a girlie's MySpace site. but, i mailed her nicely first saying, i don't mind but would you just put a not saying KW did them? she was nice as ninepence and rather frantic that she might've upset someone. i can't help feeling the only reason Sung did these was that he wanted payment, or a contract as a result of his work, and when that didnt' come, he wasn't happy.

@Charlie :
"Sung has done these textures & clearly feels they are his intellectual property, and so can dictate 'terms of use'.
Concerns about what B&B may think of this aside, Sung is quite correct as far as I understand such things. "
i have no argument there...but at the same time, isn't submitting an OXP an acceptance of it being "got at" by people who might wanna pick it apart etc? i am aware that my textures are freely available to anyone w/ PShop etc - if they wanna mess w/ them, nowt i can do about it - i will only throw a strop if they release a far better texture than i did

now, while i would be hugely chuffed if someone thought my Vampires worthy enough of being used in their OXPs even if they didn't ask, i WOULD get huffed if that someone made it out to be their work, ie the readme didn't say "Vampires nicked from IsisInterstellar OXP" or such. but then, if they did that, i'd mention it on the boards, and see what happened - no doubt the community would police matters by making feelings known. still, since i'm not losing money by someone stealing my ships, it's hardly a huge matter.

re the B&B thing - an argument could be made that Oolite doesn't rip them off (in any sense of the term), it actually benefits them : Braben's working on Elite IV next, how chuffed would he be that fanboy projects are keeping his audience alive and hungry? we all know that whtever he does will be lightyears ahead of what Oolite is, so this is no threat to him or his money. personally, if i saw my work was the subject of this much adoration 20+ years down the line i'd be over the moon - we can but hope he maybe drops in to say hi sometime.

in short (?!) - LittleBear : you've been a huge help to me and many others. PLEASE don't give up cos Sung hoyed a strop. no one else here (i hope) thinks what you did was malicious, and if Sung has a prob w/ that, well let him go. his textures were ok, but not the be-all and end-all of Oolite, and given the choice of his texture pack that i wouldn't load, and you around w/ your help and output, i have no hesitation in what i would pick.

Killer Wolf wrote:

i do art myself, have a site (where my oxp is) and browsing google i found a shed load of my images were on a girlie's MySpace site. but, i mailed her nicely first saying, i don't mind but would you just put a not saying KW did them? she was nice as ninepence and rather frantic that she might've upset someone.

#KW's got a groupie!

KillerWolf wrote:

in short (?!) - LittleBear : you've been a huge help to me and many others. PLEASE don't give up cos Sung hoyed a strop. no one else here (i hope) thinks what you did was malicious, and if Sung has a prob w/ that, well let him go. his textures were ok, but not the be-all and end-all of Oolite, and given the choice of his texture pack that i wouldn't load, and you around w/ your help and output, i have no hesitation in what i would pick.

Hear, hear!

I think it's nearly time we drew a line under this discussion. It's brought a lot of feelings to the surface and not all of them are constructive, quite the opposite in fact. We should all remember why we contribute to this BB and the Oolite project in general, to pay a little homage to a game from our mutual pasts that is dear to our hearts and advancing the project. Arguing and squabbling will only cause friction and possibly the break up of this great community, which would be a shame.

Captain Hesperus

Captain Hesperus

Been offline for two days only to find this fine mess

BTW can one can't release stuff under GPL when the game-engine is CC ...
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

# Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

Oh, the black image was a line under the topic? Or is it a mourn-band?

I saw it as the reffered to line under this topic. Uh oh, I just undermined the line.

Rxke wrote:

Oh, the black image was a line under the topic? Or is it a mourn-band?

It was the line the Capt'n called for.

I made it in a paint program, but feel free to use it as your own.

Shoo! shoo! Bad Doctor!

Sorry I come from a culture known for it's weird rudeness and ingrained offensive sense of humor (several planets burnt down our representations about a year ago after some drawings of Giles were published by a local bulletin ).