Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

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tepples
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Re: Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

Post by tepples »

A couple weeks ago, I drafted what might be the beginning of a solution: the Theme License. It's essentially a dual license of either GPLv3 (unmodified) or an MPL/LGPL-inspired license with conditions attached. Each author of at least one file in a combined work gets to specify a paragraph of conditions. So long as the combined work meets one such paragraph from each author, the author's contribution may be used.

Conditions may resemble the theme of a game jam, or they might be like the following:
Bechdel positive and no hardcore porn
The work includes dialogue between two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The work does not visually depict penetrative sexual contact.

Action girl
The work is an action game with no explicit sexual themes whose playable character is an adult human woman, visually identifiable as such throughout the majority of the primary campaign.

Trans representation
The work includes an identifiably transgender character as the protagonist or a supporting character.
Anyone interested?
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Hamtaro126
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Re: Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

Post by Hamtaro126 »

The "Theme license" sounds like a good idea. And it is a good addendum to the old GPL3 or LGPL licenses. I say I vote for it!!! :D

EDIT: Can you add the MIT Licence so I can use a fork/port of a certain DOS Game to the list of uses as well?
AKA SmilyMZX/AtariHacker.
tepples
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Re: Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

Post by tepples »

This is what I have so far.

The "This draft version shall have no legal effect." is because I don't want drafts to coexist alongside the final version and confuse users.

The MIT License is compatible with all GNU GPL versions. Could I ask how the particular DOS game is structured, and under what license, so I can suggest how to proceed once the Theme License is final?
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Hamtaro126
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Re: Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

Post by Hamtaro126 »

The game(s) I am talking about is ZZT and SuperZZT, and just got reconstructed as source from DOS EXE form into Turbo Pascal 5.5 by asie and has many forks and ports to it's name already, notable are:

ClassicZoo (special fork of ZZT by asie, also for Free Pascal, also has a PC98 build option!)
WeaveZZT (newest version used in "Hall of the Kunger Binb", both by Wil Witlark)
OpenZoo++ (C++ reimplementation of ZZT and SuperZZT, by asie, WIP, Linux/Win32/DOS32/GBA/PSP)
ZZTGO (Google GO port of ZZT)

More can be seen in the Wiki of Weavers

I am making a fork of my own, adding features from SuperZZT and MegaZeux, And improvements overall of my very own, will be included.

EDIT: Here is the problem: Although they use the MIT License; LZEXE is used during the process to actually compress the EXE, I will remove this in my fork since it only affects DOS compression space, or if it is a problem, use UPX!!!
AKA SmilyMZX/AtariHacker.
zzo38
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Re: Software licenses that ban porn and blasphemy

Post by zzo38 »

I do not believe that licenses should enforce these things, although the Theme License by tepples looks a OK compromise to me (and I would not have objections to working or contributing such a thing, since it is still GPL-compatible and is still Free software). It mentions excluding a function of computer programs from Themes, but nevertheless it might be something that an author wants, e.g. no spyware, or wanting to have a difficulty option which does not require unlocking it first (avoiding the game being too easy; the game being too easy is too common in my opinion). But, maybe not; sometimes such things may cause problems, so maybe there is a reason to exclude them I don't know. (Either way such restrictions won't apply when GPL is used, so it is still Free software.)

ZZT is a game engine rather than the game itself, so I do not expect such "themes" to be appropriate to the ZZT engine itself, but I don't know if it is supposed to be or not.

Thank you for mentioning Wiki of Weavers; I was previously unaware of it, and now I know.

For my own works, let's be known that: You can make whatever you want with it (and I won't stop you), but that doesn't mean that I endorse it. I believe having freedom of speech, being free from copyright/patents, etc. So, in this case, I would think that a non-endorsement clause might be sufficient.

Also, about the Theme License file attachment to the forum message: At least for me, it asks you to save it to a local file instead of view it. At least on some web browsers, you can copy URL and prefix "view-source:" to the URL to force it to be displayed in the web browser instead of saving it to disk first.
(Free Hero Mesh - FOSS puzzle game engine)
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