Civ2's source code petition

[Case]

Originally posted by Harry Tuttle
Letter ends here, open to additions
emphasis added

While it's a good letter, the last thing it needs to to be made any longer! Send it as it is.

[Shaka Naldur]

I like it!

[Hywel Dda]

If you are still taking signatures please accept mine.

civ2petition@h-hughes.com

[curtsibling]

The letter rules - We should let the bosses of Poly and
other sites see it and ask if they would endorse it...

[Cyrion]

Two more signatures on the french site! (sent to Harry)

[Broken_Erika]

what's the progress?

[Broken_Erika]

There hasn't been any updates in a while,
any news? i'd like to know, i'm taking programming lessons so that i can work with this,

[Per]

Great effort. Asking them to release it under the Creative Commons license is not a very good idea. It is _not_ meant for licensing of code. Better to keep focus on one suggestion, and add some examples of other games and companies that have opened the code to their old games under the GPL (Quake, Warzone...)

(You should also be aware that the Creative Commons NC-SA license would not counted as "open source" if used on code.)

Other nitpicks: It sounds in the first paragraphs as if you are asking for permission to release the source code, ie that you already have it. I guess the big problem here might be that nobody has it anymore, and it might be some work for whoever owns its copyright to check for and disentangle it from the copyrights of other companies and prune the code for "offensive" source code comments.

(Edit: JA2 wasn't released under a GPL license.)

[Harry Tuttle]

Thanks Per. What other licenses are out there, besides GPL?

As for an update, there are currently 483 signatures on the petition, with a few being added every week.

I'd like to ask if anyone can add to this, not just the letter itself. Examples, as Per suggests, are needed.

Thanks much.

[Rasbelin]

If you have changeg Civ 2 -> Civ II, then also change the other Civ titles to Roman numbers. Ie. Civ III and Civ IV. More correct then.

As for licenses, I assume you have already paid attention to the OSI website (http://www.opensource.org/) and all the licenses found there? And what about asking some influential persons support the cause (mainly Thunderfall, Markos and Dan)?

[Rasbelin]

Okay, did some reading and thinking. I would suggest the use of a BSD styled license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php), as that would constitute better licensing grounds for the current copyright holder. It would mean having to retain the original copyright notice, which most likely is more favourable for a large corporation like Atari. If you want to take into account the possible patent or trademark issues (if there's any patented stuff in Civ II or the use of any of their trademark for any derivative work has been concidered), you'd better have a license that excludes rights to any patented material and the use of trademarks. One such license is the CDDL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cddl1.php).

[CapTVK]

Ah, now i have to point out something important. There's one very important caveat when using the BSD license....

"Most of the BSD software has been developed using government grants, so the people have already paid for it. Therefore there are few restrictions on what you can do with it. The main difference between it and the GPL is that source code modification can be kept private and do not have to be redistributed. "

For a quick license comparison see here

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~pev5b/writing/econ_oss/definition.html

So a party that uses BSD licensed code in its own program isn't under any obligation to further distribute the source and may even sell his own version of it. Microsoft uses BSD code in parts of it's OS for example.

The original BSD source is still available to other parties of course and it's up to them if they want to release their own improvements in public or not..

[Leonidas]

My suggestion would be to request a release of the source code but under the supervision and ownership of UBIsoft.

In other words, UBI sound retain all control.

We (the gamers) would then gain an improved product; UBI could then have the option of releasing an improved version of CivII (once improvements have been made).

[Mercator]

Civ2 Source Code Petition continues here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=132525