Licensing issues

[reece146]

As much as I hate worrying about this kind of crap, I also don't want to see it hinder the project's success. So I think the best way to deal with it is basically to provide a technological workaround, so users can still get the data they want regardless of license status, but the game can be distributed far and wide under a fully open license. I think the solution is a game data management application, which hopefully I'll get started coding soon.

x2

I'm not sure if it is still the case, but once upon a time in order to compile mplayer from source with all the proprietary codecs there was an an extra step related to the licence you had to go through in order make it happen.

Also, some ebuilds in Gentoo make you cross your fingers and read the fine print as well.

In the case of vdrift with a data manager, if you selected "proprietary" data and press ok, maybe a simple dialog box with "There be dragons beyond this point" would make sense. Sort of a EULA and as enforcable but it proves some attempt at due diligence for the lawyer types.

I guess Fedora should wait for the one car / one track that the vdrift devs have been talking about - and/or the data manager component before including in the distro. I haven't touched Fedora in a few years, does it have an automated mechanism to do SRC RPM fetch and build via yum/apt? That might be a quick work around as well if the hosting repo would spray some legalese crap to the screen during the fetch process.

Just some thoughts.