I am currently doing an audit of all packages with "freedist" in their LICENSE. USE=nonfree enables installation of nonfree assets in prboom2/data/{graphics,sounds,sprites}/. Unfortunately, I cannot find any information where these originate from, and if they are actually distributable. Can you clarify?
Fabian Greffrath from Debian identified most of the sources for these in the prboom-plus "freewad" effort here: <https://sourceforge.net/p/prboom-plus/bugs/219/> To summarize, the nonfree dog sprites and sounds come from the Wolfenstein 3D game, nonfree menu graphics come from the DOOM games, and the nonfree sprites come from the Marine's Best Friend <https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Marine%27s_Best_Friend> (specifically it seems to come from Doom press release beta <https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Press_release_beta>). In addition, there are two supposedly nonfree sound files I'm not sure of: dssecret.wav and dsgibdth.wav. The dsgibdth.wav file sounds very much like a DOOM enemy death growl, so I suspect it's coming from one of the DOOM games but I haven't been able to track it down to a specific game. The dssecret.wav file is claimed to be free by Christoph Oelckers of GZDoom in the following commit: <https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/commit/22b1997846fb345dac5a0a8ba4c4dee35b3fcdc6>. I will contact Christoph Oelckers to figure out why dssecret.flac is considered to be free; this would affect games-fps/gzdoom regardless of games-fps/prboom-plus. Most classic Id Software games (DOOM, Quake, etc.) are released under a user license agreement that permits distribution of modified game assets (see "Permitted New Creations" section of <https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/plain/licenses/DOOM-COLLECTORS-EDITION>). However, I'm not sure if this applies to Wolfenstein 3D since all I find is this license agreement: <https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/blob/master/WOLFSRC/README/LICENSE.DOC>. If Wolfenstein 3D assets are not freely distributable,
Sorry, sent the comment unfinished by accident. Continuing: If Wolfenstein 3D assets are not freely distributable, we should not mirror the prboom-plus tarball on the Gentoo servers. We could still fetch and remove the nonfree assets in the ebuild however. Alternatively, Debian has a mirror of prboom-plus with the nonfree assets already removed: <https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/prboom-plus/>.
OK, looks like it not as bad as I feared that it would be, and there is at least a paper trail for the origin of most of the non-free assets. Using the Debian tarball would be a possibility, but OTOH we don't really need to remove all non-free assets, only the ones that we cannot distribute. Preferably, upstream shouldn't include non-redistributable files in their tarball, in the first place. (On a related issue, we made some effort in bug 676158 to unify the "non-free" and "nonfree" USE flags. Now I see that gzdoom and prboom-plus have brought the "nonfree" flag back.)
On the ZDoom forums website, I contacted Marisa Heit (randi) who claims authorship of dssecret: Sent: Mon Dec 23, 2019 6:47 pm From: randi To: vilhelmgray Yes, I created the dssecret sound using Impulse Tracker by creating a module that I then rendered as a wave file. It has no particular license of its own, since I created it specifically for ZDoom. (Unfortunately, the original module is long gone, lost to a hard drive crash almost 15 years ago.) I do not know anything about dsgibdth. So dssecret.wav should be considered a free asset (I'll contact the Debian team to let them know as well). However, we are still unsure about the dsgibdth.wav sound file -- I'll try contacting someone from the prboom-plus team to find out. Regarding the "nonfree" USE flag, I was the one who introduced them to the prboom-plus and gzdoom ebuilds. I have no objections to changing it; would you like me to rename this USE flag to "non-free" for both the prboom-plus and gzdoom ebuilds?
(In reply to William Breathitt Gray from comment #4) > So dssecret.wav should be considered a free asset (I'll contact the Debian > team to let them know as well). However, we are still unsure about the > dsgibdth.wav sound file -- I'll try contacting someone from the prboom-plus > team to find out. Thank you. Maybe this can be clarified. > Regarding the "nonfree" USE flag, I was the one who introduced them to the > prboom-plus and gzdoom ebuilds. I have no objections to changing it; would > you like me to rename this USE flag to "non-free" for both the prboom-plus > and gzdoom ebuilds? Yes, please do. (I don't have a strong opinion about either variant, but in bug 676158 we said that it should be "non-free", so let's stick with it.)
The dsgibdth sound has been identified by Andrey Budko (upstream prboom-plus admin) as taken from Heretic -- specifically the sounds/gibdth sound. Heretic is under the Activision license which always such free redistribution [1]. What's left now is to determine if the assets derived from Wolfenstein 3D are freely redistributable. The original license agreement does not permit such, but the game may have been re-released under a more permissive license at a later point as what happened to the Doom series; the presence of a popular modding community seems to indicate so [2]. [1] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/plain/licenses/Activision [2] https://wolf3d.net
(In reply to William Breathitt Gray from comment #6) > What's left now is to determine if the assets derived from Wolfenstein 3D > are freely redistributable. The original license agreement does not permit > such, but the game may have been re-released under a more permissive license > at a later point as what happened to the Doom series; the presence of a > popular modding community seems to indicate so [2]. One-month ping. :) Any news?
(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #7) > (In reply to William Breathitt Gray from comment #6) > > What's left now is to determine if the assets derived from Wolfenstein 3D > > are freely redistributable. The original license agreement does not permit > > such, but the game may have been re-released under a more permissive license > > at a later point as what happened to the Doom series; the presence of a > > popular modding community seems to indicate so [2]. > > One-month ping. :) Any news? Response from the modding community has been inconclusive so far, so I've decided to submit an inquiry directly to Bethesda (the current copyright owners) for clarification. I'd like to give them at least 10 business days to respond, so if I don't hear back by February 10, I'll assume redistribution is not permitted and therefore remove the nonfree assets from the Gentoo prboom-plus package.
I sent an email to Bethesda as well as opened a support ticket on their website, but as of the time of this posting I have not received a reply to either. Due to a lack of confirmation from the current copyright holder, I believe it is best to treat the Wolfenstein 3D game assets as not distributable until evidence to the contrary is presented.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=4cb54f5017dd253fabf1661d854e22b738b77b2d commit 4cb54f5017dd253fabf1661d854e22b738b77b2d Author: William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com> AuthorDate: 2020-02-10 00:26:05 +0000 Commit: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2020-02-11 07:39:48 +0000 games-fps/prboom-plus: Bump to version 2.5.1.5.4540.1 The non-free USE flag is removed because non-free assets are no longer provided in the source tarball. The png USE flag is removed since sdl2-image provides that functionality now. The sdl-image and sdl-mixer USE flags are renamed to sdl2-image and sdl2-mixer respectively to match the use of the matching SDL2 libraries now. Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/703610 Package-Manager: Portage-2.3.84, Repoman-2.3.20 Signed-off-by: William Breathitt Gray <vilhelm.gray@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> games-fps/prboom-plus/Manifest | 2 +- games-fps/prboom-plus/metadata.xml | 18 ++++-- games-fps/prboom-plus/prboom-plus-2.5.1.4.ebuild | 68 ---------------------- .../prboom-plus/prboom-plus-2.5.1.5.4540.1.ebuild | 64 ++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 77 insertions(+), 75 deletions(-)
(In reply to William Breathitt Gray from comment #9) > I sent an email to Bethesda as well as opened a support ticket on their > website, but as of the time of this posting I have not received a reply to > either. Due to a lack of confirmation from the current copyright holder, I > believe it is best to treat the Wolfenstein 3D game assets as not > distributable until evidence to the contrary is presented. Thank you very much for your efforts! (And yes, contacting upstreams for copyright matters can be frustrating at times.)
I received the following response on February 21: In response to your inquiry, please be advised that all of the content including the names appearing in Wolfenstein 3D are the copyrighted property of Bethesda Softworks LLC and any use thereof is unauthorized. We are not looking to license the rights to any of our copyrighted material at this time. Thank you for your interest in Bethesda Softworks. - Bethesda Customer Support(In reply to William Breathitt Gray from comment #4)
