Preventative measures to ensure what happened to nexuiz doesn´t happen to xonotic

Call me paranoid but given the fact that nexuiz is now going to be released to gaming consoles and now PCs wouldn´t it be a possible concern that the same thing could happen to xonotic?

I don´t need to explain the pros and cons of this as they pretty much go without saying but I guess my main thought is are there any preventative measures from this happpening AGAIN with xonotic.

I´m not saying this out of any reflection of whether or not the game will be good as a console port, rather the exploitation of the time people put into building the game only to have a small group of people arrive and attempt to make money out of it.

A usual preventive measure for GPL projects is to hand the copyright over to the Free Software Foundation.

But anyway, there's no risk of relicensing happening any time soon: the project was started as a reaction to the unpleasant Illfonic deal and I don't see any of the current devs doing the same thing that caused them to split from alienTRAP. Besides, the copyright belongs to several people, and all of them would have to agree to relicense Xonotic as a whole. Otherwise a single developer can only sell pieces of not-so-functional code.

I think preventive measures are already in place, also what Mr. Bougo said.

The preventive measures in place are just the trust between developers. Also, there's no mighty intellectual property overlord like Vermeulen is to Nexuiz. The game was community-founded from the very beginning.

A usual preventive measure for GPL projects is to hand the copyright over to the Free Software Foundation.

But anyway, there's no risk of relicensing happening any time soon: the project was started as a reaction to the unpleasant Illfonic deal and I don't see any of the current devs doing the same thing that caused them to split from alienTRAP. Besides, the copyright belongs to several people, and all of them would have to agree to relicense Xonotic as a whole. Otherwise a single developer can only sell pieces of not-so-functional code.

First of all, not all Xonotic developers live in countries where it is possible to entirely hand over your copyright. Germany e.g. does not allow this in its legal system, some rights always stick with the original author and cannot be given away.

The method we use is making sure NO copyright is transferred. That way, any attempt to relicense Xonotic would require asking quite many people, and not a single person who owns all copyright. That BTW was already the case with Nexuiz, and was the reason why Nexuiz content could not be used in Illfonic's game. Only the name was possible to be used...

And for this: the name "Xonotic" was a result of a discussion of many of us. I don't even know how exactly we got to that name, but that basically means that the name is sort of a "shared invention", i.e. there is no single person owning all rights on the name. That also means there is no single person who is able to e.g. sell the rights on the name. Only if a major part of the Xonotic developers agree, we could sell rights on the name. And that simply won't happen.

tbh I don't understand why anyone would WANT to buy the name. I don't understand why anyone wanted to buy "nexuiz". (especially for a commercial game)

Don't get me wrong, they aren't bad names. but you could definitely think of several that are just as good and more marketable just be sitting down and thinking for 5 minutes.

Right. This is also one of the reason causing the split - it seemed like the only purpose of taking the name was to annoy the FOSS developers, as there was no real gain from taking the name.

Right. This is also one of the reason causing the split - it seemed like the only purpose of taking the name was to annoy the FOSS developers, as there was no real gain from taking the name.

Unless the intention was to get a lot of press about Illfonic caused by the uproar about the name use, making Illfonic known in the first place.

Damn. I don't think a lot of us thought that far ahead when it all went down. Virtually non-existent indie developer does a hostile takeover of the name of a well known free open source project, angering the entire community. Many people inside said community go loud and start returning fire. The rest of the gaming world hears about it and the unknown developer is now on everyone's radar. They probably got some significant amount of publicity off of that, should've seen that one coming.

Lee, you're their most efficient PR tool. Congrats.

Well that puts my mind at ease. However looking at the new nexuiz game which I think is out now I´m not impressed by the fact that some of the levels are clearly from the old nexuiz. Does that mean they have license over those and that we can´t play them on xonotic?

Map layouts per se are not copyrighted, that's why we can have darkzone in master too (though the sources for that map are GPL now).

They did get a license from Strahlemann. So if they used his maps, that's fine.

Map layouts per se are not copyrighted, that's why we can have darkzone in master too (though the sources for that map are GPL now).

ah so does that mean xonotic could use unreal tournaments or old quake maps or not?

I´m asking because I recognize one of the nexuiz maps´comes from unreal '99 and another from quake (I don´t know which one) so unless they´re remakes and not the original maps it would be cool to have those old maps incorporated into xonotic.

would you mind saying which maps ... im curious

ah so does that mean xonotic could use unreal tournaments or old quake maps or not?

I´m asking because I recognize one of the nexuiz maps´comes from unreal '99 and another from quake (I don´t know which one) so unless they´re remakes and not the original maps it would be cool to have those old maps incorporated into xonotic.

Darkzone and aggressor are both classic maps, probably even from original Quake. Same for facing_worlds.

BTW, be careful here. Map layouts per se are not copyrightable. But exact item placement already can be.

E.g. the "facing worlds" map remake for Nexuiz may already be too close to the original to be copyright-wise safe, while the various Deck16 or Morpheus remakes that were done for Nexuiz didn't share much with the original at all and thus were safe.

But as long as we don't include "possibly infringing" maps with the game, we're pretty much safe. I don't remember a case of anyone getting even just C&D'd for a map remake that just used the layout and the general "look" of a map.