(Obsolete) The RRPGE Developer Agreement overall picture

[Jubatian]

Important (2014.10.19)! This topic is obsolete as new license plans don't involve the necessity of a Developer Agreement. For those interested it may be worth reading though, to see some intentions on how I planned the operation of the RRPGE ecosystem.


So what will be the RRPGE Developer Agreement?

The licensing model of RRPGE is based on GNU General Public License, version 3, also allowing GPL version 2 projects. The license truly is an extension to GPLv3 as allowed by that license, most notably allowing you to use everything as if it was licensed under Lesser GPL if you accept the Agreement. So basically you either produce free software or accept it to get the right to go more or less closed.

First: Why the closed path?

So why even allow closed (as in non-GPL) projects? It is simple. Open source won't normally feed you, and if you do some serious work of art, you should have the right to sell it if you want. The problem with software is that in one aspect it is art, in an another, it is just a bunch of tools and industry. The tools should be open, given to everyone, so they can make art with it. Art, however may well belong to the author.

Here using the Agreement I aim to realize a model where the tools are open, but you can use them to make, and possibly even sell art.

The basic intended goals of the Agreement

• To give you the rights to use the works in your (closed) art we produce under the RRPGE license (this is how I call the extension set to GPLv3 the project uses). The more such works we have, the better.
• To eliminate the software patent system's effects as best as possible. Those who accept the Agreement would be required to open up their patent portfolio (if any) so everyone can use them. Patents have no place here, let's have a healthy competition.
• You as developer also has responsibilities. The Agreement will be set up so once something is made, preferably it can not be unmade. History shall be preserved for everyone's good.
• The Agreement will also require a share of sales, for those who get to be able to sell their works. More on this below. (Depending on how things proceed later, this part may be dropped, replaced with a voluntary model)

The preservation of history

I plan to craft the Agreement so it can automatically enforce the preservation of history in a legal manner. This will likely involve constraints on how applications may be sold, most likely requiring them to be distributed through a central application store (the share of sales probably also makes this necessary).

To avoid leaving abandoned software in a murky legal situation, and to make it preferably impossible to "unmake" an application, the Agreement may require passing over distribution rights under the most restricted (CC BY-NC-ND) Creative Commons license to me (by this I mean any organization what later preferably will be founded for working on RRPGE), which rights may be exercised under well-defined circumstances (like one year after the termination of the Agreement for any reason, or one year after the author became unreachable, or something along the lines of this).

The use of the shares

Well, I definitely would have a humble little home on a nice little tropical island with sea view from all four towers, having a pool in the middle would also be nice. Eh, nothing like that (although it would be nice if I once could move out from these mouldy lodgings...).

These shares could be employed for many things making both RRPGE and any systems around it better. Such as:

• Funding porting RRPGE to many more devices, so your games and applications can reach more people.
• Supporting the development of tools, probably even simple no-programming-required game crafting IDEs, so they can be realized, and stay GPL, free for all who want to start making games.
• Creating better sites, providing hosting for your games, probably even servers for use with the networking features of RRPGE.
• Supporting those tools which help and helped RRPGE becoming a reality. So we can make the open software community a bit stronger, in turn making you have more or better free tools and environments to help with your art.
• Since RRPGE has little system requirements, it is viable to spread it even in lesser developed countries. This is nice for a passive support, but with the money, we could probably even get more active with these goals as well.

So it definitely has a good place, it won't just go down the drain. With this concept those who succeed will indirectly not only help newcomers to their success, but also raise their own potential.

Note that depending on how things proceed in the farther future, I am open to replace the requirement of shares with a seperate voluntary model (it may even be necessary if later a non-profit organization should be established over RRPGE).

Roughly these are the ideas behind the Agreement.