Evropi {l Wrote}:I agree with Charlie. Nobiax does this and his textures are in almost every single open source FPS game! It really isn't an issue to be vague with your licensing. And when I say vague, I mean 'vague to lawyers'... as people, we can understand very well what 'free' means. :P I think Magnius was pretty clear with what he expects, I see no room for error there other than how certain legal jurisdictions might perceive it with their convoluted systems of law.
I can't agree here. At least from a distributor's perspective (as packager for a Linux distribution), I can say that if a content is not clearly licensed, it's freeware, which is "nonfree" by all free software definitions. If you don't clearly tell the user about her right to redistribute, to edit or to sell the content that was labelled as "free music for your games" or "free textures for your FPS", then the user has to assume that she does not have those rights.
Properly licensing one's content also makes sure that it will stay available for its users. You can say one day "here is some free artwork", then everyone will start using it in their project, and then you decide to create your own proprietary content based on the artwork _you_ designed, and you place your artwork under a more restrictive copyright, which makes illegal the use of it in open source projects. You have a right to do so, but most people who care about open source won't gladly use unlicenced "free of charge" content.
So if there's a will to give "free as in free speech" music to the world, as it seems to be the case for Magnius, it's not that hard to say "it's Creative Common Attribution - Share alike CC By-SA 3.0" (or any other good license) and to bundle a license file with your content, and/or put it on your download page.
Now if you say that all open-source FPS use unlicensed "free of charge" artwork, then it's quite bad. It means it properly also badly documented, since every time I package a game I try to make 100% sure that the assets are free. If not, I put them in a "nonfree" repository (or I don't package them at all if I'm not sure that the freeware content grants redistribution rights). It's not only a matter of lawyers, free software and free culture belongs to everyone of us, and we need to know what our rights are. And it's really easy to pick up a license, when you know what you want to do and to allow with your artwork. If you're not sure about it, then most likely other people shouldn't base their work on it.