Future of TripleA

dllahr

Hello

Apologies for jumping in, I am extremely new to TripleA, but over the last several months I have been contemplating porting a version of TripleA over to BoardGameArena. I believe this would address a number of the issues listed in the first post (4, 5*, 6, 7, 8?, 9, 10). I was envisioning a very simple start - a single map / single set of rules - but perhaps it is possible to build greater flexibility into the system.

I came to the forum to ask about this possibility and found this thread - I know the game is open source so in theory it can be reused, but one concern is the GPL license: would using the game images (not code) force everything at BGA to also have to be open source due to the GPL license? (it is currently not open source).
Would be grateful to hear what you all think.

Cheers,
Dave

beelee

@dllahr Good Luck Dave

No Apoloigies necessary:)

prastle

@dllahr I am not a lawyer and I have only recently returned to TripleA. With that being said I would assume a GPL can be played anywhere. BUT! It might not be a good idea to do this If they have many of the popular common games (that are available everywhere in North America to purchase) on their site. This would mean they have paid for a license to the trademark owner. It would also mean they have purchased a license to use it on their site. NOW if their games are GPL then there are no worries

(also HI BEE @beelee )

Panther

@dllahr I would wait for a statement of @LaFayette here (whom I pinged herewith) as I vaguely recall that he has dealt with similar questions in the past.

Cernel

@dllahr said in Future of TripleA:

I know the game is open source so in theory it can be reused

This is true for TripleA as a game-engine, but I don't know if this is true for the maps. TripleA itself is an unplayable game-engine because it comes with no maps and no games.

The main thing is that the maps have been made by this or that person, most of whom are unknown and likely currently absent from TripleA, so

what copyright license every map is under is unclear to me at least, so I guess they are generally fully copyrighted (but I don't know) by the (mostly unknown) TripleA users who made them over the years unless I'm overlooking something.
for the most part, you cannot ask them what copyrights their maps are under if they even know or knew it.
you would likely not even know if they violated any copyrights if they did.

Cernel

@cernel However, there are some maps (downloadable with TripleA) which I would call almost certainly copy-rights free. The map for the "Pact of Steel" game comes to mind. I surmise that should be almost certainly under the same copy-rights as TripleA itself because it is a well know TripleA community made game, whose map also serves as the official TripleA game-making guide, meaning that I assume you should be safe re-making any kind of "Pact of Steel" only game anywhere beside the concerns you expressed. Another example would be "Big World" (being a well known TripleA original and the map to which the official TripleA rules-book refers).

beelee

@cernel

yea seems as if artwork can't be used without permission ? Idk ? veqryn created a folder with all triplea art years ago.

I thought triplea being open source was just a big happy hippie party and one could use what they want.

But that is not the case evidently. I don't think anyone gives af, unless someone trying to make money off there stuff.

but ... yea idk

LaFayette

@dllahr AFAIK all of TripleA is covered under the same GPLv3 license: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/blob/master/LICENSE

"The[..] GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. " [1]

AFAIK, all parts of TripleA are covered by GPLv3. The usage of those components need to be GPL compliant. If you created a fork of TripleA, and kept the source code publicly available, but in a format that was easy for Board Game Arena to use directly - maybe that might fly. The license text is not necessarily that hard to decipher. If you give it a careful read, it should have an answer for how far you can go. My understanding is that GPL essentially requires all derivative usages to be (1) non-commercial and (2) open-source (as in the source code must be readily available).

The maps are kept as their own entities. Their license is currently not explicit. I would assume that they are all GPLv3 as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#:~:text=The GNU General Public License,share%2C and modify the software.

dllahr

@lafayette Thank you for the response, much appreciated. But I have to say whether the license text is easy to decipher or not, its application is not straightforward. For example, from the Wikipedia article you link to, the section on "Communicating and bundling with non-GPL programs" addresses the ambiguity, itself quoting from the gnu.org GPL FAQ:

"Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).

If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program."

My emphasis added above - not only is this not clear, it is undecided! So it seems doing this would have to risk a legal battle. This is unfortunate because it seems like it would be a win-win for lots of people to have TripleA on BoardGameArena.

LaFayette

@dllahr cool, the application is often the gray zone.

Couple quick points:

(1) TripleA is not going to sue anyone, whether merited or not.

(2) If the integration code for BoardGameArena is public, and can be cloned and modified, and if BoardGameArena does not charge - I think that is within the spirit of the license for TripleA. In other words, if everything related to running TripleA is open source, but BoardGameArena just acts as a platform for running that code - provided it's not commercial - seems fine to me.

I'm a bit curious though how you would envision porting TripleA to BoardGameArena? It's a big and gnarly code-base with lots of logic tied directly to its UI. Did you have any thoughts on what such a port would look like?

dllahr

@lafayette good points, sorry for the delayed response.

So BGA is nominally free, but people can join / become members (I think it is $25/year) for some enhanced features (allows creation of custom games, specifying friends only etc.).

Re: porting - I would intend to implement the game rules rather than directly port the code. I've already written code in python to simulate battles for a very similar game (before I found they already exist). That code I wrote won't be directly usable (BGA uses PHP) but it gave me a sense for how to structure / organize and the amount of work. If you're curious here's the repo of that code. It's messy and the unit test coverage is is not what I'd like but it's out there.

rdub429

I have access to funding that might help the community. Dev/mod message me if interested.

ubernaut

@prastle

beelee

@rdub429 said in Future of TripleA:

I have access to funding ...

would you elaborate please

I will PM you

rdub429

@beelee sent you PM