Make it possible to play Duck Marines without the music files installed
akien-mga opened this issue · comments
Hej Simon,
Following some discussions on the FreeGameDev forum[1] and your kind relicensing of the game's asset made by Tangram Games to CC By-SA 4.0, I'm looking at providing an official RPM for Duck Marines on Mageia.
Since the game music is licensed under CC By-NC-ND 4.0, I would like to provide a .love archive without the files in res/music (until you and the FLOSS community come up with a nice replacement with a more distribution-friendly license).
Since the music filenames are hardcoded in musicmgr.lua, the game issues a Lua error if they are missing. Could you make it so that it's possible to run Duck Marines even if the music is missing? Maybe with some kind of parsing of the res/music folder when launching the game, setting the appropriate filenames only if they are available.
Thanks!
Hi again, Akien.
As of commit 0388f24 the game should work without the music files.
Thanks Simon,
I imported Duck Marines 1.0b into Mageia's official repositories (without the NC-ND music since it would have forced me to label the game as "nonfree").
I'll listen to some tracks on OpenGamesArt and try to find nice free replacements for the current soundtrack.
I think it might be a good idea to ask the original artist whether he might consider relicensing as well. I really think the current soundtrack is great and very fitting so replacing it is kind of a shame.
That would indeed be the best solution. I must say I also enjoy the current soundtrack when playing on my system, but for the official Mageia package I wanted Duck Marines to be 100% FLOSS.
Would you be willing to contact the original artist yourself, since you are probably already in touch? Or should I have a go at it?
For the reference, here is Fedora's well-documented licensing policy regarding art assets (Mageia follows the same policy, and most big Linux distros have similar policies): https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#Content_Licenses
Basically, it would be best if the soundtrack could be relicensed as CC By-SA, since it would make it free even for the Free Software Foundation :-) For Fedora, CC By-ND is also a valid license for art assets.
Some reference on what are the real implications of the -NC clause in CC licenses: http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
FYI, I finally put my patched source + libre music tracks in their own git repo: https://github.com/akien-mga/duckmarines-libre
Previously I was using a custom tarball for my Mageia package, but it's simpler to maintain a forked branch to sync changes with upstream.