Subject: Re: [bug#35234] [PATCH] gnu: Add the-dark-mod.

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2019 18:18:15 +0200

Hi Ricardo,

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> writes:
> […]
>>> First: what game engines do we provide that can only be used with
>>> proprietary game data?
>>
>> OpenMW, Arx Libertatis, OpenRCT2, off the top of my head.
>
> Hmm, that’s not good then.  I think we should take a closer look at them
> to decide whether they should be removed.
>
> The description of Arx Libertatis says this:
>
>    Arx Libertatis is a cross-platform, open source port of Arx Fatalis,
>    a 2002 first-person role-playing game / dungeon crawler developed by
>    Arkane Studios.  This port however does not include the game data, so
>    you need to obtain a copy of the original Arx Fatalis or its demo to
>    play Arx Libertatis.[…]
>
> Aside from the “open source” mention I don’t think it’s right for us to
> recommend that users obtain a copy of a proprietary game.

The “you need to obtain a copy…” bit is problematic because it refers to
non-free software.

However, I believe it’s really talking about “non-functional data” in
FSDG terms:

  https://gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html#non-functional-data

So, rephrased to suggest obtaining the non-free _data_, the sentence may
be OK per the FSDG.  The problem is that it’s maybe not that simple to
obtain the data without the non-free game…

Thoughts?

Now, I would hope that the free game engine could serve as the basis for
a free game, with free game data as well.

Ludo’.