Angband as Free Software

[Nick]

An issue has been opened requesting that "proprietary data" in Angband be released under a "libre" licence or removed. My understanding is that the data referred to is Shockbolt's tiles and dubtrain's sounds; further discussion in the comments indicates Adam Bolt's tiles may be included as well.

I have some initial opinions about how to respond to this, but would like to hear from people in the community first. I await your comments with interest

[MITZE]

I always play with tiles and sounds disabled, so I don't have strong feelings about whether they stay or get removed.

[Grotug]

I love the dubtrain sounds and they are a significant part of my enjoyment of Angband. I would hate to see them go. I never use tiles and therefore have no attachment to them.

[Raerick]

I would not take that seriously. I don't know throwaway1037, but I looked into the history the account, and it doesn't look good. The smell of a licensing troll. Effectively this 'request' is powerless in my opinion and should be ignored.

A good example from the history of throwaway1037:
here

There are plenty more that are similar and all over the place in the software targeted. I do not get the feeling that any of this is done in good faith.

[backwardsEric]

The objection to Shockbolt's tiles and dubtrain's sounds appears to be that their licenses don't allow redistribution for a fee. The objection to Adam Bolt's tiles appears to be that it's license would allow someone to redistribute them under a "non-free" license of some sort.

If there was something that could be done that would make life easier for Linux or *BSD package maintainers (especially for the most common distributions), that would be useful, but I don't think it's worth removing those two tile sets and the sound files from Angband to do so.

[OmniNegro]

This guy is a joke. I would not even reply to a troll like that. All he lives for is to try to squeeze out an admission that something might be owned by someone else so he can then start demanding money for that work. Notice that I never said he owned any of the work. Nor did he say that he did.

I cannot reasonably tell you that I deserve compensation for you living in a non free house. I do not own your house.

This guy is a troll. Waiting under the bridge he does not own and demanding money for crossing the bridge. Ignore him. Do not respond at all. If he wants to fight in court, he can first pay the court costs. He will doubtlessly lose the case once you point out that he does not actually own anything he is suing about.

[Nick]

I'll wait a bit before dealing with the issue itself, but to indicate where my thinking is going I'll say a couple of things:

• 'Freedom' is a very loaded word, but I think Angband and its variants are pretty strong on not telling people what to do
• If nothing else, I'm grateful for this issue for directing me to the hilarious statement

  The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”)

[Pete Mack]

He literally posted under "throwaway" user ID. I think you can ignore it. It is perfectly legal to package angband without the files--at least once upon a time, it failed gracefully when the files (and pref files) were removed.

[Sacksquatch]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a supporter of FOSS and sometimes a donor to some orgs, but I'd never use an OS that restricted me like that. For example, if I want to install proprietary af Steam, FU I'm installing Steam. While 99% of what I install is libre, I want to be in control of what gets installed, not my OS.

I personally like the sounds and use them, but I don't use the tiles so much. For what my opinion is worth, I say no, don't strip anything.

[Bill Peterson]

This is not Angband's problem.

I remember the years of agony that the Angband devs and the community went through to get the code released under GPL and I would not like to see that repeated. The current contributors should be focused on what they believe will make the game better rather than pleasing outsiders who have their own agenda.

If these radical libre people are upset that the licenses for Angband graphics and sounds don't mesh with their projects then the proper approach is for them to contact the owners of those assets and negotiate an acceptable solution.