Subject: bug#62784: drascula, lure, lure-de, lure-es, lure-fr, lure-it, sky: non-commercial license

From: Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2023 09:32:04 +0200

Hello,

Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> The license of all these packages have that inside:
>> 3) You may not charge a fee for the game itself. This includes
>> reselling the game as an individual item.
>
> And the FSDG has that:
>> Non-functional Data
>> -------------------
>> Data that isn't functional, that doesn't do a practical job, is more
>> of an adornment to the system's software than a part of it. Thus, we
>> don't insist on the free license criteria for non-functional data. It
>> can be included in a free system distribution as long as its license
>> gives you permission to copy and redistribute, both for commercial
>> and non-commercial purposes. For example, some game engines released
>> under the GNU GPL have accompanying game information—a fictional
>> world map, game graphics, and so on—released under such a
>> verbatim-distribution license. This kind of data can be part of a
>> free system distribution, even though its license does not qualify as
>> free, because it is non-functional.
>
> So unfortunately here we need to remove these games.

This report seems to appears from time to time in free GNU/Linux
distributions throughout the years.

In the license you mention, you omitted the second point : "you may
charge a reasonable copying fee for this archive, and may distribute it
in aggregate as part of a larger and possibly commercial software
distribution". In other words, I think the non-commercial restriction is
moot in our situation. Consequently, it seems okay to keep these games
in Guix. Debian, Trisquel, PureOS distributions seem to agree, FWIW.

I understand our opinions may differ here, but I do think software
freedom is not at stake when including drascula and friends in Guix.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou