Forestry in violation of public license? (Update: Apparantly not.)

[Skuli]

I normally wouldn't care this much, but the general asshattery and smug self-satisfaction in the Forestry thread has me annoyed.

http://www.mod-buildcraft.com/download/buildcraft-for-minecraft-1-0-0/

Buildcraft is licensed under some sort of GPL-esque public license.

I took a look at some of the .class files and FakePlayer.class is virtually identical between Forestry and Buildcraft, and Forestry outright includes a ton of the Buildcraft API files.

I don't believe simply including the API files is a violation, and it's possible Buildcraft and Forestry's FakePlayer.class has been derived from some other common source which is more freely licensed, I'm not a developer and I have no idea of FakePlayer.class's pedigree...

For anyone who's interested, I ran "strings FakePlayer.class > FakePlayer.out" on both the files and then "diff -y" the two files...

[Arkalius]

Re: Forestry in violation of the Buildcraft Minecraft Mod Public License?

What's the point of this line of inquiry? Is this a vindictive attempt to get SirSengir in some kind legal trouble because he is mean to Tekkit? I don't see the point. This isn't going to benefit anyone. We can't blackmail him into letting his mod into the pack, and if we somehow were to succeed in causing him legal problems it would really just hurt the entire MC modding community by setting a precedent of legal reprocussions for making mods and lots of other ugliness. At any rate, it would require the BC creators to actually want to pursue legal action against him and since he actually works with the BC creators I doubt that would happen.

Yeah, it sucks that SirSengir isn't more open to having his mod included in the modpack but we don't need to implode the entire mod community over it. It's not really a good idea either to start drawing attention to the legal vagaries of one mod when this modpack itself sits in a legal gray area with copyright.

[Skuli]

Re: Forestry in violation of the Buildcraft Minecraft Mod Public License?

Vindictive, no. It would give me a personal sense of satisfaction to be able to counter the "Tekkit is stealing" comments with "So is Forestry mod", there's no doubt, but I don't know if I'd consider that "vindictive."

If Forestry is in violation of the license and should be open source then it opens the door for someone else to fork the mod, potentially, and might eliminate the "piracy" complaint for anyone who tries to reverse the change recently made.

Trying to force the issue from Tekkit's perspective would, of course, be viewed fairly negatively by the mod community as a whole. "They'll take down mods that disagree with them" and all that.

But anyway, who knows where the FakePlayer bit comes from? I can only find references to it in Buildcraft discussions and crash dumps.

I notice there's one in IC2 also but it's SIGNIFICANTLY different as far as I can tell.

*edit*

It looks like this was added by the person who ported these two mods to Bukkit via mcportcentral, so this is probably not a productive path to follow.

*/edit*

[Pilchard123]

I know it says "apparently not" at the top of this thread, but read Section 5. SirS can release under whater licence he likes, including one that says "You can use this to kill kittens as long as it doesn't use the Technic launcher."

[Skuli]

This discussion is academic at this point, but section 5 doesn't grant any sort of blanket protection to re-using Buildcraft code. Essentially section 5 is saying you can reference the Buildcraft API and build mods that depend on Buildcraft functions/objects yet have a proprietary license. This appears to be designed to address a clause in the GPL, which requires derived (or linked) works like Forestry to be GPL licensed as well, according to many people.

Section 6 is what keeps me from copying Buildcraft's source, renaming it to Makecraft, and distributing it as a closed-source app. Section 6 would also apply if I copied a source file from Buildcraft, altered a few lines, and included it in my mod, which is what I suspected Forestry had done initially.

As far as I can tell, though, the only significant shared code is the API and some third-party code written by Maeyani(?) that's common between the two, so like I said, makes this a moot point.

And I know. tl;dnr/SUMMON WALL OF TEXT/whatever.