Is the Wesnoth project moving towards becoming non-free? (Free as in Freedom) There is a thread over at the Wesnoth forums that is really scaring me. They are discussing changing the music license to one that is non-free. Specifically changing music to a non derivative license. I think this is a very bad sign for the community. Whats next? Art? One of the reasons why the wesnoth art forums are so good is because they help new artists learn to become better. Thats how people learn to be better by editing and reworking old quality art. Whats so different about music. Why should musicians get special treatment? Someone in the thread brought up then they couldnt listen to Wesnoth music on their mp3 player because they would have to convert them from ogg. (which would be illegal under the CC no deriv license) It would be a terrible shame on the community. Some of the contributors dont have to share but everyone else does. How does that work out? How long would that last? Just think of it. Making a trailer for wesnoth using a remixed wesnoth music clip would then be considered illegal.
It’s sad to see the world falling apart and with that open ideals as well. Just seeing eric raymond on the thread call debian policy “extreme notions of doctrinal purity” made me sick.
Edit: Well it looks like maybe the storm will pass after all. The latest quote from the project lead David White:
“Likewise, we are a Free software project, and we want contributors who are willing to make their work Free. Having a myriad of different contributors who want to license their work in a myriad of different ways probably isn’t going to work well for us.
Quality is irrelevant if the content isn’t Free, because then we can’t use the content and remain a completely Free project.”
So I’m hoping it will turn out on freedoms side. It has been Wesnoth’s main goal from the beginning. But this is definitely a real issue in open source development. Look at freeorion, supertux and many other FLOSS games out there who have free but not gpl compliant licenses.