Authorship and licensing of documentation, examples and assets.

[plugwash]

I am looking at getting pygame zero into Debian. Part of that process is checking that everything seems to be in order from a copyright/licensing point of view. I can of course strip stuff out when the Debian packages but it would be good to preserve sufficient documentation and examples that someone can reasonably get started with the package off-line.

I have already been in contact with Daniel about this by private email, he has asked that I bring it to the bug tracker so that links can be sent to other people.

The following are issues or potential issues I have identified so-far. This may not be exhaustive.

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There are screenshots of scratch in the migrating from scratch tutorial. Debian's position seems to be that in most cases screenshots should be considered to be deriviative works of the game they are screenshots of but I understand there are some complexities in the licensing situation regarding scratch. Furthermore the screenshots also include material that appears to have been ripped from the commercial flappy bird game Unfortunately the tutorial relies heavilly on said screenshots so it's not really feasible to include the tutorial without them.

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Daniel has stated "The requested license for all the contributed games as CC-BY-SA as described in the original issue (https://bitbucket.org/lordmauve/pgzero/issues/26/10-classic-games). That may not be a strong enough attestation, however."

When It tried to follow that link I got an access denied message, so I was unable to investigate further. Note that some versions of CC-BY-SA are considered acceptable by Debian and others are not.

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There are a large number of images and sounds, music in the docs, examples and test directories used as backgrounds, actors etc. My guess is that some of these were created explicitly for the project while others were taken from elsewhere. If we are going to include this material in the Debian package we need to know where these media files came from and what license they are under.

Daniel has confirmed that the pink Alien sprite is CC0 from kenney.nl.

Daniel has said that "the spaceship (https://github.com/lordmauve/pgzero/blob/master/source-vectors/ship.svg) is original" but has not confirmed who created it (himself or one of the other contributers) and whether it can be taken to be under the same license as the code.

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The "basic" and "snake" examples seem to have no information on author or license.

Daniel has stated that they were created for pygame Zero but not who by and whether or not they are under under the same license as pygame zero itself?

Also there is the question of assets,

the spaceship and the alien are already discussed above
the "block" hasn't been discussed yet, we need clarification on it's authorship/license.
the fonts seem to have the nessacery copyright info in the fonts themselves and seem to be under acceptable licenses.
the music seems to be by a composer who died two hundred years ago, so the composition is in the public domain, but the performance may be under copyright, do you know where the recording came from?
similarly do you know where eep.wav came from?
and similarly what about the snake assets?

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"mines" claims in it's commit message to have been copied from https://github.com/MiniGirlGeek/PyGame-Zero and does not seem to have any license information associated I have posted an issue about this at MiniGirlGeek/PyGame-Zero#1 . There is also a font in there whose license and authorship seem somewhat unclear. The "copyright" field in the font says "Public domain / GNU GPL" which is somewhat self-contradictory and doesn't name an author. http://www.fontspace.com/lcd-solid claims an author and that the font is in the public domain but it's not clear how trustworthy that information is. I think probablly the best path here is to strip the font out and use something else.

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From the hg/git history the "pong" example seems to be by someone called ivanmesic but has no license info and I can't seem to track down contact info for it's author.

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From the hg history the "asteroids" example seems to be by someone called Ian Salmons but has no license info and I can't seem to track down contact info for it's author. Daniel has said he can "easilly track him down".

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The documentation for the flappy bird example tells me it was converted from a version posted at another github repo, but said other github repo has no license. Daniel sent a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/3trann/flappy_bird_in_87_lines_of_python/cx92l5m/ which claims "Open source, do whatever you want, claim it as your own, source code." but the author of the claim is listed as "Deleted".

On the other hand the "conversion" looks like it was actually a rewrite, both the individual lines of code and the overall structure of the program look totally different. So I think you are free to license your own code under whatever license you desire.

Probablly a bigger issue is the art assets it looks to me like the art assets were ripped from the proprietary flappy bird game. They would need to be replaced if we are going to ship the game.

Also there is a mysterious file called "Flappy Bird.sb" any idea what it is?

[plugwash]

Sorry to bump on this, but it would be good to have clarification on some of these issues, especially the spaceship, the block and the basic examples.

[knowledgejunkie]

Also there is a mysterious file called "Flappy Bird.sb" any idea what it is?

@plugwash

That is a Scratch 2.0 (scratch.mit.edu) project for an initial version of the game. You can open/test it using the online Scratch editor.