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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

So far we've had one major thread calling for a rewrite in a new language, one calling for a new license, and one insinuating the devs should accept the project is done and move on with their lives.

Is it any wonder open source gaming struggles with this kind of broad negativity?

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Put this another way: lots of people don't have a second thought about telling this /extremely successful/ project how it really should have been run.

It took me a while to realise, but HN renders text in between stars as italics.

    * italics *

Becomes

italics

    Indented text is rendered in verbatim monospace

Its called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

But its only a very limited subset of it. For example I cannot do [thing](url) URL links like you can on reddit. Anyone implementing a comment system that wants rich text should be using it, though, if a WYSIWYG editor is too much, or if its targeting a technical crowd.

The text processing of Hacker News is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc.

HN only supports the two formatting types you described, plus auto-linking of URLs written out in full, such as the one in the previous paragraph.

If it were extremely successful, they wouldn't have written this blog post begging for help to save the project from dying.

On this website I am not at all surprised that people want it to be rewritten in javascript or to be relicensed from the GPL.

There has been some recent discussion with moving the art and music assets away from GPL into a CC or similar license. The developers understand GPL was never really designed for those media. (You’ll have to remember, Wesnoth started in 2003; back then, Wikipedia was using GNU FDL for everything.) The tricky thing would be contacting all the music and art contributors to get their permission first, which is not an easy task for a project of this size.

The GPL was designed for non-code media. It is one of the reasons that GPLv3 has more broad language that does not refer specifically to code. Having the same license for the software and media has obvious advantage: it's a lot simpler to interact between the two of them.

Some artists just get huffy about having "their" art modified, as if their artistic integrity should not allow modifications. They would have the same problem with any free license, though, so just teaching artists how the GPL works has worked ok so far.

I'm a big fan of use-reuse whether it's code, audio, visual or whatever, but it's a bit rude in my opinion to call artists who don't want other people modifying their art "huffy."

I would like for everyone to feel comfortable putting their creative output in the commons but I respect people who aren't comfortable in that way and abide by their wishes.

I think it's undue ego. If a developer gives you code but imposes conditions that the code must not be modified because this damages their artistic integrity, (and I have seen people make this claim), most people would consider that ridiculous, because code is functional and usable. In the context of a videogame, artwork is no less functional and usable. Your ego is not more important than the people who are using your artwork for a videogame.

If you don't want to give people your artwork, then don't. But don't impose conditions that you will give it to them but feel personally offended if they modify it.

That's, in the end, their prerogative. They can choose to give, but under a no-derivative licence, if they so wish.

They can have all the prerogatives they want as long as they understand that their prerogatives have no place in a free game. Their artwork may be scaled, resized, and cropped in order to fit into a playing field. The colours may be changed in order to indicate teams. Additional animations may be required for certain actions. The style might need tweaks to fit the existing style of the game.

Unmodifiable artwork poses many practical problems for a free game. It's simply unacceptable.

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