Licensing

Last update july 8th 2011

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Licensing is not the most exciting topic, but if you wish to contribute, you will absolutely need to read it.


Contents

Why

Since SuperTuxKart is included in many linux distributions with strict license requirements (e.g. Debian), we cannot accept tracks/karts/textures/etc. with unclear licensing terms. Furthermore, we are hosted (freely, I might add) by SourceForge, which requires that all hosted materials be released under open licenses; therefore posting materials with improper licenses would violate our terms of hosting

Considerations to always keep in mind

If you wish that your contribution be included in STK main or add-ons, always note down the author's name, website where image was found and full license name of everything you use (textures, models, sounds, etc.); when you make something yourself also note that you did it yourself and which license you release it under; we recommend making a file named "License.txt" to contain all this information; if we do not receive this information along your track/kart/etc., we will be legally unable to use your contribution in any way!

If you reuse a texture from another STK track, ideally still note down its author and license, by reading the appropriate License.txt file, a simple reference to another track makes things very hard to follow (rationale : the other track might get removed, or the original texture may be replaced with another texture of a different license or by another author, and then all links between tracks from license files become broken).

Which licenses?

Our license of choice is Creative-Commons-By-SA version 3.0 or more recent (Note: Creative Commons is hereafter abbreviated CC).


These licenses are acceptable : CC-BY 3.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0, GPL, LGPL, Apache License, Mozilla License, Artistic, MIT, BSD License, X11 license, CC0 (Public Domain)

Licenses that can be used as a base for derivative works : CC-BY 2.0 / 2.5, CC-BY-SA 2.0 / 2.5. If you find an image released under this license, it is NOT acceptable to use this image directly in your work, however you are allowed to make a significant modification to it (for instance crop it and make it repeatable to build a texture) then you are allowed to release your modified version of the image under the same license, version 3.0, which is accepted. What constitutes a significant modification is open for lawyers to debate upon but as long as your modified version does not look like a copy of the original we won't be picky.

These licenses are NOT acceptable : GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Sampling Plus, any Creative Commons with the "Non-Commercial" clause, any Creative Commons with the "No Derivatives" clause, Free Art License, CGTextures License, Image*After Terms, Mayang license, TextureArchive Terms, "Creative Commons" alone without a version number or without full name


For other licenses, we need to check on a case-by-case basis

Combinations

There is yet another thing to consider :

Where to find files

Looking for properly licensed material?

The following websites offer only public domain material, that is always OK to use :

The following websites provide resources under a variety of mixed licenses; you may find a lot of good material there but verify the license on a case by case basis :

Retrieved from "http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Licensing"

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