OpenJK
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JACoders
different icons for JK2/SP, JA/SP, JA/MP?
(tl;dr: if someone can give me SVG or layered XCF source for the OpenJK icon, I'll try fixing this myself.)
If you have all the flavours of OpenJK installed, they aren't distinguishable at a glance because there's only one icon, particularly with GNOME Shell's bad habit of truncating app names:
The original games solved this by having a different icon with multiple lightsabers for MP mode.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which has the same "separate engine for SP/MP" issue, has traditionally got around this by having different coloured icons, and iortcw (analogous to ioquake3/OpenJK) does the same for its redrawn icon. For the Debian packaging, I also made it more obvious which colour was multiplayer by editing that icon to have smaller, alpha-blended copies:
Does someone have a source file for the OpenJK icon, like a SVG or layered GIMP/Photoshop file? I'd like to try doing a similar modification for that. Perhaps JK2/SP could keep the blue-on-black (or get more blue) to be reminiscent of its box art, JA/SP could have a more teal/green version to be reminiscent of its box art, and JA/MP could have multiple lightsabers shown?
There's a Photoshop file but it doesn't render in gimp correctly I believe. (missing the glow)
I would prefer the main icon we have now remain as is for JAMP.
And Jedi Outcast is not being distributed in the first release so, that is not relevant at this time. JASP exe could be different color though.
Yeah, I'm aware that JO support in OpenJK is experimental. I'll have to include JO in the initial upload to Debian anyway, because adding extra binary packages at a later date is painful (it goes back through legal/technical review every time I add one); but I'll initially only be uploading to the 'experimental' part of the archive, and when the JA part is ready to leave 'experimental', I'll make sure to exclude JO from those builds.
In the current packaging, openjk + openjk_sp are one .deb (openjk-academy), openjkded is another (openjk-academy-server) and openjo_sp is a third (openjk-outcast). openjk-academy and -server share a base directory if they're both installed, but openjk-outcast has a separate base directory.
However, they're all built from one source package. An approximate Windows equivalent would be to build one source tree and have openjk-academy-setup.exe, openjk-academy-server-setup.exe and optionally openjk-outcast-setup.exe as the final product.
How are you able to preserve the glow? Gimp and Paint.net don't seem to preserve it when opening. Or are you just using the png files that exist?
I'm extracting the icons from code/macosx/OpenJK.icns right now: that's the only logo/icon I found in the source tree. (GNOME Shell is probably using the 512x512 version in my screenshot.)
If it's released under GPL, then the source file (Photoshop file?) should really go in the source tree too, even if open source tools can't actually open it yet.
@ensiform, are you saying that OpenJK in general is under GPL-2, but the icons found in code*/macosx/ (and the source files in OpenJK_AppIcon.zip) are not? If that's the case, who's the copyright holder and what copyright license are they distributed under? Is there anything else non-GPL in the tree that I should be aware of?
Non-GPL but GPL-compatible licenses like the one used for the minizip code are fine, but I have to document them all in the package metadata.
They don't have any license applied to them at the moment. As far as I'm aware, it's not something that we've considered yet. I don't see any reason not to license them under the GPL or perhaps another license such as one of the CC licences.
Sorry to be being so picky about this stuff, I know you'd all prefer to be coding, but I would like it to be possible to download and redistribute OpenJK without breaking the law :-)
They don't have any license applied to them at the moment.
If that's the case, then anyone running git clone on your repository is technically infringing copyright by making a copy of those icons (not that the maker of your icon is likely to sue anyone in practice, but they could). I assume that's not what you wanted!
I don't see any reason not to license them under the GPL or perhaps another license
You probably all know this already, but just so we're clear: permission to redistribute/modify a particular copyrightable work (e.g. an icon in this case) under a particular license has to come from the copyright holder (e.g. the artist in this case). Without that permission from the copyright holder, redistribution is copyright infringement, and saying it's licensed under (say) GPL-2 when it actually isn't would be a misrepresentation.
If the copyright holder is willing to agree to either GPL-2, GPL-2+ or something permissive like http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT (or has handed over their copyright to one of the OpenJK developers or given you a very broad copyright license with permission to sublicense, but in the absence of lawyers and paperwork that seems unlikely) then that's ideal.
It simplifies things a lot if the icon and other supporting files are available under terms no more restrictive than the code (GPL-2-compatible terms, i.e. GPL-2(+) or a simple permissive license that gives blanket permission to copy and modify), because then you can legally do things like embedding the icon in the executable. If the icon is CC-BY-SA or whatever, the question of whether you can legally distribute an executable built from GPL source code with that icon embedded in it becomes more complicated - I'd have to re-read the licenses in detail to offer any opinion on whether that's allowed or not.
The GPL is slightly awkward for artwork, because says I need to include a copy of the preferred form for modification whenever I redistribute a derived work - the choice of preferred format for modification is less clear-cut for artwork than for code, but in this case it's probably the .psd. So my work-in-progress Debian package would not be GPL compliant unless/until I add the .psd, and your binary autobuilder builds are probably not either, unless/until you offer the .psd as part of the source. If it is indeed GPL-2, that's easily fixed, just include the .psd in the "complete machine-readable source code" that GPL-2 paragraph 3(a) talks about.
It is also fine for the copyright holder to give a dual-license - "you may distribute this work under the terms of either GPL-2+ or CC-BY-SA 4.0, your choice". Wikipedia pages used to be dual-licensed, and parts of Firefox still are.
Sorry to be being so picky about this stuff, I know you'd all prefer to be coding, but I would like it to be possible to download and redistribute OpenJK without breaking the law :-) No worries :P We want to get this right too.
To clear up the licensing of the icon art, we'd need to contact the original icon creator. @Razish and/or @ensiform should know who made it. Do you think if the icon header file was generated at build time, it would simplify things?
That would be Razor like i said.
@ensiform, are you saying that OpenJK in general is under GPL-2, but the icons found in code*/macosx/ (and the source files in OpenJK_AppIcon.zip) are not? If that's the case, who's the copyright holder and what copyright license are they distributed under? Is there anything else non-GPL in the tree that I should be aware of?
Non-GPL but GPL-compatible licenses like the one used for the minizip code are fine, but I have to document them all in the package metadata.
ALL of the icons come from the zip file. Ask razor who made them to find the author.
Do you think if the icon header file was generated at build time, it would simplify things?
From a legal perspective, that isn't necessary, as long as it's accompanied by the source files (preferred form for modification), i.e. the contents of that zip file (or at least the .psd). The header file and the Mac .icns files don't have to be removed, but their source should be added (when its license is resolved).
From a technical perspective, I am personally a big fan of "don't keep things in your source repository if they are not actually source", but it's a trade-off: there are sometimes situations where the pragmatic thing to do is to commit a generated file in addition to the source.
I think a more pressing issue is that we've never been given any permission to recreate the Jedi Knight logo artwork in our own icons. The artwork may be a trademark held by Activision, Disney, Lucas, or whoever handles that stuff now.
Even if the icons are released as open-source by the artist, there's still the potential for legal troubles because of the design of the logo itself.
EDIT: This looks like the relevant trademark: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75318783&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
No, it resembles this artwork: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn75318783&docId=SPE20090321122758#docIndex=3&page=1
EDIT: Looks like the logo itself is not a registered trademark but it's still a trademark under "common law" in US trademark law. I'm not a lawyer.
Revisiting this. @smcv You seem knowledgeable in legal stuff. We're still having problems with finding the author of the icons, and now @dionrhys has brought up the problem of similarity to the original Jedi Knight logo.
So, first issue. The icon was created specifically for OpenJK, but you seem to suggest that isn't enough for us to now do as we wish with it (for lack of better phrasing). If I for example were to create a new icon now, does that mean I would have to explicitly give it a license, or can someone else working on OpenJK give it a license? Is this where the list of contributors becomes important?
Second issue. I don't know if you have any knowledge in this area. The icon is clearly based on the Jedi Knight logo, and I doubt it could get away with fair use. Would you agree?
The first issue @xycaleth mentioned: copyright. Before I start, I should say that I am a Debian developer and my day job is working on open source, so I know my way around copyright licensing; but I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There are two things to consider with open source and copyright: "can we legally copy this at all?" and "is it open source?".
1. Can we legally copy this at all?
You hold copyright on any original creative work you make, whether it's code or a logo or whatever. Copyright law says nobody else may copy that work, or create "derivative works" (modified versions) from it and copy those, without your permission (with a few exceptions for e.g. reviews or parodies, which are called "fair use" in the USA or "fair dealing" in the UK). A copyright license like the GPL is just a standard way to formalize that permission and apply conditions to it (e.g. the GPL says I may copy OpenJK binaries - which are a derivative work of your OpenJK source code - but only if I also provide the source from which I compiled them).
This means you can't copy the current icon, or change its copyright license, without permission from its copyright holder (whoever that may be); and if you created a new icon now, you would have to give permission (in the form of a copyright license) before I would be allowed to copy it.
It's entirely possible (and indeed likely) that the author of the current icons gave some sort of vague permission to do things with the icon; but if you don't have a record of who they are or what they gave you permission to do, if I try to upload that to Debian, the archive administrators are not going to be happy with the legal risk I'm making them take.
Legally, what we care about is the list of copyright holders, not the list of contributors, because those are the people and/or companies whose permission we're relying on - in particular, the copyright holders on the original JK2/JA code-drop are Activision and/or Raven. Presumably all the OpenJK developers are individuals doing this in their spare time, so they each hold the copyright on their own contributions (e.g. if I wrote some new code for you today, it would be © 2015 Simon McVittie). If I somehow persuaded my employer to let me work on OpenJK on company time (unlikely!), because of the contract I signed when I started working for them, the copyright holder for that part would be my employer, not me personally, and it would be their permission you'd need.
2. Is it open source?
Open source distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora require that everything they distribute (in their main archives at least) has an open-source license from its copyright holder. For instance, something under a "non-commercial use only" license (like Creative Commons NC) or "you may copy it but you may not modify it" license (like Creative Commons ND) is not allowed in Debian's "main" or "contrib" component. The exact rules we follow in Debian are the Debian Free Software Guidelines https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines which were the basis for the Open Source Definition http://opensource.org/osd. In practice, it makes everyone's life much, much easier if literally everything you release, including documentation, icons and so on, is under either the GPL or a "GPL-compatible" permissive license (the MIT/X11 license, which is the one used by your latest version of code/rd-vanilla/glext.h, is the one I normally recommend to people who are looking for a simple permissive license).
OpenJK itself is open source (GPL) but depends on non-open-source software (the Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy assets), so I would like to put it in Debian's "contrib" archive area, which is intended for exactly that sort of software. It would be a shame if I had to move it to "non-free" just because it contained a non-open-source icon. (In practice I wouldn't do that, I'd delete the icon instead - but I would prefer to avoid having to do that.)
OK, second thing, trademarks.
The author of the OpenJK logo presumably drew it from scratch - taking ideas/layout/design from the JK2/JA logo, but not directly copying that logo - so I think the copyright remains theirs (once again, I am not a lawyer). However, @dionrhys brought up the issue of trademarks, which are a parallel "intellectual property" thing alongside copyright. I know less about trademarks than I do about copyright, but I'll try...
Copyright is about ownership of a creative work, but trademarks are mainly about consumer protection, misrepresentation and managing reputation - for instance, picking a random example of a product and its manufacturer, only Lego may sell toys with their name/logo, so that buyers can expect that anything with that logo will have the quality they expect from Lego, and Lego's reputation isn't damaged by poor-quality goods being sold as if they were Lego products. So the important thing for OpenJK is that a reasonable person wouldn't be confused and think that OpenJK is in some way official. As far as I know, trademarks never prevent you from saying true things: so you shouldn't say that OpenJK is "the Jedi Academy engine" (because it isn't really, any more - you've modified it), but it should be fine to describe it as "compatible with Jedi Academy" or "an engine for playing Jedi Academy".
Open source distributions like Debian don't generally worry about trademark licensing from the point of view of whether something is open source or not, because the worst-case scenario is that we have to change some metadata and logos, and maybe rename the software if we're really unlucky - which is a lot less problematic than dealing with a copyright problem, which is likely to involve having to delete functionally significant code for which there is no replacement.
Regarding the current OpenJK logo, I don't know where the line would be drawn for "confusingly similar" - forks of partially-open-sourced games are in a particularly confusing position, because the whole point of OpenJK is that you can use it to play (the unmodified levels and game content of) Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, so in a sense, having a similar icon is not really even very misleading... particularly if that icon is only used in menus/etc. after installation, and not used as "advertising".
I had a go at some logo sketches based on the general idea of "like ioquake3 but with lightsabers", and here's what I came up with:
Hopefully that inspires someone more artistic than me...
Thanks for the information @smcv! We've tracked down the icon author and I've contacted him about covering his work under some permissive license. I'm just waiting to hear back from him now.
Still waiting to hear back from him. Last message I got back from him was he wanted the PSD file which I sent him, and then he went silent :p
Still waiting to hear back from him
He has now given permission to redistribute the icon under the permissive MIT/X11 license.
(This does not resolve my feature request that started this whole thing off, which was colour-shifted or otherwise variant icons for the three modes - JASP, JAMP, JK2SP - but that's only a nice-to-have, whereas the licensing issue could have been a problem.)
There's a Photoshop file but it doesn't render in gimp correctly I believe. (missing the glow)
I noticed while sending the pull request for the source files that Github's previewer does know how to render the Photoshop file, with the glow and everything. I'll see whether I can find out what the Github people use for this - that might be a way to get a more editable version.
I started making an SVG version of the icon about a week ago, but it doesn't have the inner detailing.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/874909/OpenJK_Icon.svg
Do we think that would be fine? The inner bevels and stuff aren't really noticeable at low resolutions I don't think. Plus SVGs can be edited by any vectorized image editing program (I used InkScape)
I started making an SVG version of the icon about a week ago
Nice!
I think the inner bevels do make a difference at higher resolutions (like in GNOME Shell)... but we could use your white area as a mask, show the corresponding pixels of Antonio's bitmapped icon inside that area, and take the glow from your SVG. The resulting SVG wouldn't be self-contained unless we embed the bitmap in it, so environments that understand SVG icons (like GNOME Shell) probably wouldn't be able to use it directly, but it would be a nice way to generate icons at arbitrary sizes, or icons with a transparent background, or variant icons (changing the glow colour), or whatever.
I'll see what I can do about adding the inner bevel as part of the SVG (not simply importing the image as a bitmap). I stopped where it is now when all of the licensing issues came up as I wasn't sure whether it would be worth progressing any further.