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I… Huh? I’m fucking flabbergasted. What’s the catch? Are they high? Are their lawyers on a teamwork sauna conference for a week? What’s going on? This is so fucking unnerving
God damn it, we’ve jumped timelines again, haven’t we? Buckle up.
Rare EA W
I didn’t know so someone else might be wondering what GPL3 means.
- Anyone can copy, modify and distribute this software.
- You have to include the license and copyright notice with each and every distribution.
- You can use this software privately.
- You can use this software for commercial purposes.
- If you dare build your business solely from this code, you risk open-sourcing the whole code base.
- If you modify it, you have to indicate changes made to the code.
- Any modifications of this code base MUST be distributed with the same license, GPLv3.
- This software is provided without warranty.
- The software author or license can not be held liable for any damages inflicted by the software.
For a bit of extra context, points 5,6 and 7 only apply if you distribute the software that is based on the GPL licenced software, if you just use it for your own internal use you dont have any obligations (not really relevant for games but just for additional info).
That’s honestly quite fair.
So you say we might get new scenarios and stuff?
At a minimum yes.
I said it in another thread, but…
Good guy EA.
It is unlikely I will ever say that sentence again, but I hope they prove me wrong.
Like I said there, it’s not the first time, either. They’ve already open sourced a bunch of their (actually cool) accessibility tools. I do believe it’s the first time they release a game, though, but I’m not sure about that.
That being said, they patented it and it’s not open source because they have a clause that let’s them block you from using it if they don’t like you.
Patents in videogames are overall gross imo.
From what I remember, they even patented the little ping selection wheel you find in Apex. EA is shit.
The language on their patent info page doesn’t say that:
Electronic Arts (EA) promises not to enforce against any party for infringing any of the listed EA patents. A list of patents subject to this pledge can be found below, and EA may add additional patents to this pledge at a later date.
EA makes this pledge legally binding, irrevocable (except as under “Defensive Termination”) and enforceable against EA and all subsequent patent owners of the listed patents. This pledge does not provide any warranties or assurances that the activities covered by pledged patents are free from patent or other intellectual property infringement claims by a third party.
Defensive Termination
EA reserves the right to terminate this pledge for a specific party or its affiliates going forward if that party files a patent infringement lawsuit or other patent proceeding against EA, its affiliates, or partners.
They seem to be claiming that they are legally bound to allow usage of these patents unless YOU try to patent them or sue them for infringing on your patent.
I’m not a patent lawyer, though, so if you are or I’m missing a different piece of info I’m all ears.
“You can use it as long as you don’t sue us” isn’t very open source. Although I was exaggerating when I said they can refuse access for anyone they don’t like.
The things they patented are also seriously simple. One of them is for changing UI color, they should have never been given them in the first place.
It’s better to assume the worst when dealing with EA.
No, that is “you can use it unless you specifically sue us for infringing on the patent we’re releasing”, as I read it. I don’t know how necessary it is to protect yourself from somebody taking the patent you’ve released freely, patenting them themselves and then suing you back, but that seems to be what they’re protecting against.
This entire thread is about how assuming the worst when it comes to EA is often not giving them credit for a number of actually cool stuff they do. This included, in my book. I don’t think that “oh, sure this someone is doing seems fine, but don’t trust them anyway” is a particularly good way to handle… well, pretty much anything. You don’t need to fanboy for corporations, but you also don’t need to rage against them consistently. The whole idea is to reward them for good moves and punish them for bad ones.
This seems like a good move. More of this, as far as I’m concerned.
Ok, but it’s simply not open source and patents aren’t something that should be encouraged in the videogame industry. Patents are expensive (too expensive for the indie scene) and usually used to bully smaller players.
Not to mention they patented things that were already common. If they were altruistic, they would have just actually open sourced it and called it a day. They also have other patents of common things that they didn’t add to the pledge, this “altruisme” is mostly just there to add weight to patents in the industry when it thoroughly didn’t exist before EA and Warner Bros smelled blood in the water.
The wording from what I understand also means they can hit back for any kind of patent related litigation, not just for this one specifically. It’s a threat. “Don’t fuck with us and you can keep using this thing we made”, but the thing they “made” has already existed for a decade or two and they certainly weren’t the first. It’s just bad vibes behavior imo.
I guess…? Were you planning to sue EA for patent infringement? Because it specifies that the exception applies to patent-based lawsuits.
I mean, “let’s plant some patents for accessibility tech that we give away with a specific caveat and then turn the tables on someone who is trying to sue us for some unrelated patent infringement but may have used our accessibility patents before” is a hell of a long con.
Look, you’re fixating on finding a caveat to this so you get to keep being angry with these guys and I’m here to free you from that burden. You get to keep being mad with them and still acknowledge that someone, somewhere in there did a mostly good thing for mostly good reasons. It’s fine.
EA isn’t a person. There’s a ton of people there. Some seem quite nice. On a more general level, the entire risk of unbridled corporate dominance of public life is that it’s perfectly possible for a company made entirely of very nice people to do some bad shit sometimes, or even most of the time. You don’t need them to be an evil cabal to call them out when they do that. And you don’t lose any face for acknowledging when they don’t.
Being EA, I’m waiting for the monkeys paw to kick in
You’ll still need to buy the games to get the assets legally. EA is just checking if they can offload the modernization of old games they don’t want to remake to the community to keep the revenue stream going without having to invest on it.
It’s a win-win situation if it works.
I dont think that is the motivation, they already have modernised versions of these games available on steam.
What is the modernized version of generals?
Modernised as in made to work on modern systems, not a change to the game.
Ic. My bad.
Subclause they can inject microtransactions into any derivative works /s
I’m confused, years ago they released the game for free. Then openra came around and built a modern ish game from it. Then they did a remaster and the source code was available. Now they say you can do just about anything you want? How did openra work without this license ?
OpenRA was written from scratch and just uses the assets from the free game.
This is the source of the original game
