Proposal
The upcoming Content DB for Minetest 0.5.0 should adopt the following policy for submissions:
“We only accept things released under free software and/or open source (FOSS) licenses.”
Notes
In this text, I also include any artwork or documentation when I say “FOSS”. To absolutely avoid any possible confusion, with “free software” I mean, as defined in https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en and with “open source software”, I mean as defined here: https://opensource.org/definition
Rationale
Summary
- Some freedoms should be non-negotionable, there should be a baseline for everyone
- De facto our community is already almost exclusively FOSS, so this is more about formalizing and clarification of what is already informerly happening for years
- Our community has benefitted and grown a TON from committing to FOSS, and continues to do so
- The forum policy on licensing is old and too vague, a few people interpreted it as if some non-free licenses are OK (I dare to contest that)
- Strict FOSS-only policies have worked well in other communities like Wikipedia
- Content DB is an OFFICIAL project and likely to be tightly coupled with Minetest, so policy DOES matter
- Minetest itself is stricly FOSS, it seems just natural that things on the Content DB are as well
- Mods are an essential part of Minetest, no mods = nothing to play.
- Getting your stuff to Content DB should be a privilege, it is earned by committing to FOSS licenses
- Everyone benefits from the numerous FOSS community creations, it's only fair that others in turn treat the community the same way it treated you when they want something on Content DB
First of all, I believe some freedoms should be non-negotionable. The freedom do use a software for whatever purpose is an essential freedom for every user. Likewise, the freedom to share, modify, and share those modifications are also pretty essential. In practice, these things are happening all the time in our community, it's basically the daily routine, our lifeblood. So I am not exagerrating when I say “essential”.
If we permit any non-free licenses, this means that it's okay for modders to deny such freedoms to their users. The community loses something. At the very least, this would just hinder the typical routine and the community would be forced to work around that. Non-free simply does not fit into our community. I strongly believe a minimum baseline of freedoms should be established and maintained (!). The Storage DB is the perfect place for this.
Let me talk a bit about our creative community. It's big. Our community has grown because of FOSS. I'm not saying this is the only factor, but still a factor. We have now hundreds of mods and other things released as FOSS. I'd say almost everything ever release here is free. Non-free things (i.e. creations released under copyright or under restrictive licenses) do exist, but they are a tiny minority here.
Many new modders have used the source code of existing mods for study. The mere existance of tons of code is a great way to get started. Code and artwork has been re-used, shared and modified freely to create new awesome things. Things which have been abandoned long ago have been picked up again. Forking was a common theme. And pretty much nobody was offended by this, no, this was encouraged. People collaborated where they wanted, some other people made stuff from scratch. The more “things” have been created and explicitly as free software, this has in turn motivated more modders to join in and release their own code under free licenses. It's like a network effect. In the end, everybody wins. This community is also one of the reasons why I have sticked around with you all for so long. Thank you to everyone who has contributed time and effort into anything Minetest and shared it freely, be it ideas, mods, artwork, writings, tools, worlds or just funny screenshots. :-)
And now our result is a large community with a vast library of things to use freely. I cannot stress enough how important this actually is for Minetest.
Now imagine how our community would look like if modders would have selfishly proclaimd, “No. This is MY mod and only I am allowed to use it and modifiy it and share it!”. Or if people would have tried to obfuscate their work so that nobody could replicate it. This MIGHT have been a possible course of action. If this would have happened, our community might have not seen such a growth and maybe would be in general more hostile and harder to navigate through. Minetest would be simply not the same. I am glad this is not my community.
Please note my proposal is actually not that groundbreaking or revolutionary. We already have a long-standing forum policy regarding mods which says “Any mod that disallows derivatives cannot be published on this forum. These include CC NoDerivs and pretty much any closed source licenses.”. It does not explicitly rule out some particular licenses generally considered to be non-free, but it also does not explicitly permit them. Now a few people have interpreted this policy that some non-free licenses are, in fact, okay. I don't know where this idea is coming from, but it does exist and is also the main reason why I am writing this lengthy post. It is not clear if this interpretation was even intended that way. Anyway, in practice, almost all creations are FOSS here, and there's already kind of an informal rule, if something non-free appears, eyebrows are generally raised, even if it is (seemingly) allowed under the forum policy.
Thus my proposal is simply to clarify that we, as a community, really mean it when we talk about FOSS, and that there are really no exceptions. The policy for Content DB should be “We accept only FOSS.”, and not something with exceptions or something vague.
Again, such a policy is NOT revolutionary, it's pretty standard in many other FOSS (and alike) communities. One popular example is Wikimedia. If my suggested policy is adopted, it would have little impact on existing mods, because almost all mods are already 100% FOSS.
Also remember the Content DB is an OFFICIAL project and will also be included in Minetest itself. Mods are an essential part of Minetest, this is not just something where policy doesn't matter. Minetest itself is free software with no exceptions or compromises. It just seems natural that the mods distributed through the OFFICIAL Content DB also be FOSS without exceptions.
It would be strange if Minetest itself is strictly free software but the Content DB is a weird chaotic mix of free and non-free software and other things.
But I also know there will always be a few people who disagree and still like to release things under non-free conditions. We should not and can not stop them from doing so, and we definitely do not control every mod ever written. But what we can do, is making it clear that we will not give OFFICIAL support or publicity for anything non-free, this includes hosting it on the Content DB. If anyone feels strongly about releasing proprietary things, we wouldn't stop them. But then they can not expect any official support or promotion from us. There's still the entire Internet open for publication.
The Content DB is not a place that should just be “anything goes”, as it will likely to be tightly coupled with Minetest. Getting your stuff in this Content DB should be a privilege, not a right. The way to gain this privilege is simply sticking to FOSS licensing.
Think about it like this way: You are yourself benefitting from a huge library of free creations by an awesome community. It's a huge gift to you, and the rest of the world. It only seems fair that you in turn treat the community the same way.
The Big Question
So what do you think about my proposal?