Holidays 2014 contest

[atom0s]

One of them is selling items and they refer it as donations which isn't really in my opinion, i'm sure if SE wanted to, they could cause them some serious trouble. Do these "donation" servers even contribute at all?

Not really, they are more interested in making money off our work than contributing back. So anything they claim to have working they do it as a profit margin rather then help the project.

[kernel]

There has to be a way to ban them from future updates. Lay the hammer down and disable content to them unless they contribute back. It's not fair to you guys for all the hard work you do for all of us. Seriously, I know a few servers out there that have certain content working and get donations. Make the project more private than it already is. Otherwise their selfishness will cause issues to the whole project. Just throwing my opinion out there. Don't let them get away with stealing your work for self profit. I think everyone agrees.

[starlightknight]

There has to be a way to ban them from future updates. Lay the hammer down and disable content to them unless they contribute back. It's not fair to you guys for all the hard work you do for all of us. Seriously, I know a few servers out there that have certain content working and get donations. Make the project more private than it already is. Otherwise their selfishness will cause issues to the whole project. Just throwing my opinion out there. Don't let them get away with stealing your work for self profit. I think everyone agrees.

Well - if it bothers the core team enough they could look into relicensing the project to the GNU Affero GPL instead of the plain GPL. Depending on how much of the source copyright belongs to the current team this could be either easy or messy, but the AGPL is recommended by the FSF for networked software as it requires the release of all source code by the act of running it on a server to anyone who can interact with that server (something that the regular GPL does not). Other private server software such as Sylverant for Phantasy Star Online have made this move for similar reasons. While greedy donation-hungry server operators may not care about that licensing requirement, it would give the core team a legitimate claim to send a C&D to the server's ISP, something that ISPs in many areas of the world will comply with providing the claim is valid.

See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

[kjLotus]

There has to be a way to ban them from future updates. Lay the hammer down and disable content to them unless they contribute back. It's not fair to you guys for all the hard work you do for all of us. Seriously, I know a few servers out there that have certain content working and get donations. Make the project more private than it already is. Otherwise their selfishness will cause issues to the whole project. Just throwing my opinion out there. Don't let them get away with stealing your work for self profit. I think everyone agrees.

Well - if it bothers the core team enough they could look into relicensing the project to the GNU Affero GPL instead of the plain GPL. Depending on how much of the source copyright belongs to the current team this could be either easy or messy, but the AGPL is recommended by the FSF for networked software as it requires the release of all source code by the act of running it on a server to anyone who can interact with that server (something that the regular GPL does not). Other private server software such as Sylverant for Phantasy Star Online have made this move for similar reasons. While greedy donation-hungry server operators may not care about that licensing requirement, it would give the core team a legitimate claim to send a C&D to the server's ISP, something that ISPs in many areas of the world will comply with providing the claim is valid.

See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

relicensing is probably what we'll do going forward, i know atom0s has been talking to me about it a few times recently

[atom0s]

There has to be a way to ban them from future updates. Lay the hammer down and disable content to them unless they contribute back. It's not fair to you guys for all the hard work you do for all of us. Seriously, I know a few servers out there that have certain content working and get donations. Make the project more private than it already is. Otherwise their selfishness will cause issues to the whole project. Just throwing my opinion out there. Don't let them get away with stealing your work for self profit. I think everyone agrees.

Given that the project is open source there is no way to blacklist them from obtaining the newest content we push to the repo. Thus effectively allowing them to just continue what they are doing.

The best method we can take is changing the projects license agreement not allowing users of our code base to make any money regardless if it is a donation or not. And regardless of the purpose of the donation. It would be the same way of how TeamSpeak's licensing works. You are not allowed to host a TeamSpeak server with their extended free license on a site/server that has any form of donations.

[starlightknight]

There has to be a way to ban them from future updates. Lay the hammer down and disable content to them unless they contribute back. It's not fair to you guys for all the hard work you do for all of us. Seriously, I know a few servers out there that have certain content working and get donations. Make the project more private than it already is. Otherwise their selfishness will cause issues to the whole project. Just throwing my opinion out there. Don't let them get away with stealing your work for self profit. I think everyone agrees.

Given that the project is open source there is no way to blacklist them from obtaining the newest content we push to the repo. Thus effectively allowing them to just continue what they are doing.

The best method we can take is changing the projects license agreement not allowing users of our code base to make any money regardless if it is a donation or not. And regardless of the purpose of the donation. It would be the same way of how TeamSpeak's licensing works. You are not allowed to host a TeamSpeak server with their extended free license on a site/server that has any form of donations.

You'll have a tougher time relicensing that way as it would not be GPL compatible. It seems to me like going Affero GPL would be a better bet as it would retain GPL compatibility. There is a non-commercial license called the Aladdin Free Public License (AFPL) - Ghostscript used to use this. The license is basically GPL + a non-commerical use clause, but the FSF ruled that they do not consider it a valid free software license and that the restriction makes it incompatible with GPL software. Because of the challenges associated with this, Ghostscript ended up moving to GPL.

That means you'd be unable to link to any GPL software, and for each piece of code that is currently GPL you would have to either rewrite, obtain permission to relicense from the author, or have solely written all portions of the relevant DSP code to do that (in which case you give permission to yourself), as you wouldn't be able to continue to link against contributed GPL source. GPL and AGPL specifically have a clause in each license providing compatibility with each other, avoiding this problem and making it much easier to move to that.

While AGPL doesn't prevent them from making money from the software (which IS part of the freedom in truly free software) - it does allow you to compel them to release the source code of their server, which can allow any good changes they have to be reintegrated. Since derivative works of GPL software must also be GPL, that would in itself give you permission to reintegrate it once the source is out there.

[legionffxi]

As a former employee of an ISP I can assure you that no ISP will take any C&D from an open source project with any seriousness, no matter what license you put on it. When the MPAA and RIAA sent out letters all we did was email the host threatening to terminate there accounts. Nothing ever came of it because noone was compelled by law to turn over any IP or users records proving that they were the ones breaking the law.

If these users hosting are already profiting off the work of DSP believe me they will not care about a C&D order and just change and continue changing ISP every time a letter is sent.

[starlightknight]

As a former employee of an ISP I can assure you that no ISP will take any C&D from an open source project with any seriousness, no matter what license you put on it. When the MPAA and RIAA sent out letters all we did was email the host threatening to terminate there accounts. Nothing ever came of it because noone was compelled by law to turn over any IP or users records proving that they were the ones breaking the law.

If these users hosting are already profiting off the work of DSP believe me they will not care about a C&D order and just change and continue changing ISP every time a letter is sent.

Same problem exists with enforcing a non-commercial clause - in the end its about how far you're willing go to enforce it, and the validity of the claim. Going with a well known license instead of custom gives your claims a greater standing as its more tested when a claim is presented.

Even if all you are able to do is force them to keep switching ISPs, that is something that requires manual work on their part and the risk of downtime if the account is suspended. I would find it hard to believe that the amount they make from donations on servers that usually have around 100-150 connected players at best would be worth it if that persisted very long.

For many servers too they don't really do paid hosting and host it out of their home instead, which is how they make enough for it to be worth it, as they don't have the extra server cost to begin with. That puts their personal internet connection at risk, and in many areas, and they would quickly run out of ISPs they could switch to if they were limited to local service offerings.

It may not be effective against someone extremely determined who is willing to dodge and switch isps all the time, but I'd it's likely a strong enough tactic for a project this size. At some point, the little bit of donation money won't be worth the trouble - it's not like they're making millions off the software.

[Vivitaru]

As a former employee of an ISP I can assure you that no ISP will take any C&D from an open source project with any seriousness, no matter what license you put on it. When the MPAA and RIAA sent out letters all we did was email the host threatening to terminate there accounts. Nothing ever came of it because noone was compelled by law to turn over any IP or users records proving that they were the ones breaking the law.

If these users hosting are already profiting off the work of DSP believe me they will not care about a C&D order and just change and continue changing ISP every time a letter is sent.

I second that, i worked for an ISP for almost a decade and all they do is inform customers about "illicit use" of their internet access when complaints are received and they will never divulge the identity to the plaintiffs unless they receive a court order and that's when things starts to get expensive. Maybe put a donation button on the forums here to help for legal fees, wouldn't that be ironic?

[TeoTwawki]

Wow, I didn't think I'd win anything. I wasn't even trying I been slacking off lately. Didn't know github had those handy lil graphs till now.

I have a thought to share regarding encouraging new contributors.

Those donation servers typically give people some kind of in game reward. I'd very much like to see servers operators that reward players that happen to play on their server and happen to make a pull request for something that gets merged into DarkStar, rather than reward players that give them "donation" money. That might expand the minion pool a bit, encourage people to learn at least. I know most FFXI players aren't experienced with this sort of thing, but a lot of stuff is easy to learn. Even fixing a an ID that got missed or a typo somewhere helps.

My first contribution was just fixing a spot where someone had the wrong stat called in a script, and I knew zero lua before that. I initially decided to start contributing in order to learn lua, and now I love it.

Sadly, it'll never happen with the servers that expect donations.

One of them is run by someone that is taking the money so they don't have to get a job. It was already proven they were stealing from the donations once, and I'm sure they are still doing it now due how they are. It's not going to change either. Until that server is gone, they will always pocket the donations.

Another one that we are aware of is in the same boat. However, they claim donations are for server costs when their server is hosted at one of their houses. Meaning there is no cast. They are pocketing 100% of the donations for profit.

Yeah, the server(s) that do that crap will never change, but I'm saying those of us that care could reward people on our servers that share/help out the community. I dunno how effective it'd be, but it'd be neat and couldn't hurt.

edit: this entire idea was admittedly a bit of wishful thinking on my part