Someone released the FOSS RTS 0 A.D. on Steam without speaking to the developers

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/0AD

"Hello, 0 A.D. Gamers!
Helllloooooo
This is Kira speaking as a member of the 0 A.D. Forums!
[In no way do I own this game, all that stoof, belongs to them I just want a place to add in 0 AD Gamers without actually having to add them on steam! :)"

Sounds like a kid.

Looks like Valve has already removed it from the Steam catalogue.
Best way to avoid this (and potentially worse scenarios such as rigged/malicious versions) would be if the 0 A.D. devs just released it on Steam themselves. I heard there is some exasperation over a 100$ listing fee that Valve takes even for free games. But even ifso, it might be worth it. Battle for Wesnoth is on Steam for more than 4 years already. Since then I havent heard of any third party attempts to capitalize on the code.

We totally agree that the person had the right to upload it to steam due to the license. The concern here is Wildfire Games' identity theft, the lack of certainty about the source code (Verified, not verified), the mistakes in the title, and especially the potential load on our servers if the person didn't change the multiplayer lobby, and bonus, the positive or negative reputation of the game's presence on Steam in an alpha version for Wildfire Games and 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant since the person is pretending to be us. As an additional cost, moderation might have been problematic.

Regarding the legal part, there is no CLA on 0 A.D., so if it had to be re-licensed to link to the Steam SDK, I have potentially 500 contributors who disagree with taking this into account. Some of them are part of a fork, and some of them are dead.

You have to be the copyright owner to post on Steam, but I'm not sure.
In fact, if the person had contacted us beforehand, we could have considered something, but the fact they totally ignored us and or our messages made it a matter of urgency.

We're actually really interested in what it would take to go on Steam properly, and whether we can at all so please get in touch if you know what's required.

We'd like to thank all the people that reported the game on Steam, and we're sorry it had to go to such extents.

Thanks for coming here to give your thoughts directly. A quick idea: could you not set up a page and company on Steam, and leave it as Coming Soon? Plenty of other developers have done that. Gives you a way to ensure you're ready for an eventual release and protect the game too.

We totally agree that the person had the right to upload it to steam due to the license. The concern here is Wildfire Games' identity theft, the lack of certainty about the source code (Verified, not verified), the mistakes in the title, and especially the potential load on our servers if the person didn't change the multiplayer lobby, and bonus, the positive or negative reputation of the game's presence on Steam in an alpha version for Wildfire Games and 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant since the person is pretending to be us. As an additional cost, moderation might have been problematic.

Regarding the legal part, there is no CLA on 0 A.D., so if it had to be re-licensed to link to the Steam SDK, I have potentially 500 contributors who disagree with taking this into account. Some of them are part of a fork, and some of them are dead.

You have to be the copyright owner to post on Steam, but I'm not sure.
In fact, if the person had contacted us beforehand, we could have considered something, but the fact they totally ignored us and or our messages made it a matter of urgency.

We're actually really interested in what it would take to go on Steam properly, and whether we can at all so please get in touch if you know what's required.

We'd like to thank all the people that reported the game on Steam, and we're sorry it had to go to such extents.

First off kudos to you. I've seen people get mad over forks before (Emby) and it's weird. You're 100% right that the line they crossed was trying to impersonate you. A common way for projects to protect themselves from these things is to trademark the name (Kodi).

Pixel Dungeon and at least one of it's forks is on Steam. Maybe you can reach out to their devs for advice on getting your game on Steam.

Thanks for coming here to give your thoughts directly. A quick idea: could you not set up a page and company on Steam, and leave it as Coming Soon? Plenty of other developers have done that. Gives you a way to ensure you're ready for an eventual release and protect the game too.

We could. Question is whether we are legally allowed to have a GPL2+ (Technically some our libs are GPL3 so we'd have to be careful) game on steam "as is" (re-licensing is impossible). If we are then we can try setting it up if Steam allows coming soon forever. If we aren't then we should never go there.

I imagine Steam might be more careful now so we'd have to get in touch with them somehow.

We're actually really interested in what it would take to go on Steam properly, and whether we can at all so please get in touch if you know what's required.

It's mostly $100 and agreeing to the Distribution and SDK Access agreements. The rest is mostly best practices stuff: localisation, branding requirements, controller support, stuff like that. The best bet would probably be to talk to other folks that have already done it: Supertux, Blender, RetroArch, are ones that come to mind. For rustling up the $100 you could take donations, potentially with a specific call to action. You might also consider Early Access as an option if you feel the game isn't quite ready yet, although you wouldn't want to stay like that forever.

It's mostly $100 and agreeing to the Distribution and SDK Access agreements. The rest is mostly best practices stuff: localisation, branding requirements, controller support, stuff like that. The best bet would probably be to talk to other folks that have already done it: Supertux, Blender, RetroArch, are ones that come to mind. For rustling up the $100 you could take donations, potentially with a specific call to action. You might also consider Early Access as an option if you feel the game isn't quite ready yet, although you wouldn't want to stay like that forever.

Question is whether we are legally allowed to accept "Distribution and SDK Access agreements." Yeah I'll see if I can talk to my contacts there when the time comes.

The game isn't quite ready yet, the lag in late game might put off a lot of people. And most importantly, I don't know if the team is ready for the influx of people. As you can see for Spring it wasn't a smooth ride https://video.fosdem.org/2020/K.3.201/gamedev_spring_steam.mp4

We don't have that many active developers these days.

We totally agree that the person had the right to upload it to steam due to the license. The concern here is Wildfire Games' identity theft, the lack of certainty about the source code (Verified, not verified), the mistakes in the title, and especially the potential load on our servers if the person didn't change the multiplayer lobby, and bonus, the positive or negative reputation of the game's presence on Steam in an alpha version for Wildfire Games and 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant since the person is pretending to be us. As an additional cost, moderation might have been problematic.

Regarding the legal part, there is no CLA on 0 A.D., so if it had to be re-licensed to link to the Steam SDK, I have potentially 500 contributors who disagree with taking this into account. Some of them are part of a fork, and some of them are dead.

You have to be the copyright owner to post on Steam, but I'm not sure.
In fact, if the person had contacted us beforehand, we could have considered something, but the fact they totally ignored us and or our messages made it a matter of urgency.

We're actually really interested in what it would take to go on Steam properly, and whether we can at all so please get in touch if you know what's required.

We'd like to thank all the people that reported the game on Steam, and we're sorry it had to go to such extents.

These are good reasons to be concerned. This person clearly acted maliciously, and it's no surprise that it was quickly removed from Steam (for several reasons).

I've heard of similar things happening with people impersonating an author/publisher and publishing their book on Amazon or even paying someone to voice an audiobook for a work they don't own the copyright to and collecting royalties for months, even after telling Amazon about it, and when it was finally removed, never seeing any of the royalties, of course. Valve is far quicker on the mark, it seems.

If you're curious how that relicensing exercise panned out for VLC (they did get it relicensed in the end), here's their press release on the matter: https://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html

The modification affects the VLC engine, also known as libVLC (and libVLCcore), allowing applications or plugins based on the VLC engine to be built under non-GPL licenses. Some libVLC bindings for other languages have already changed license too.

The license of VLC media player will continue to be GPLv2 or later. This will not impact normal users of VLC in any way.

All the developers have agreed to the relicensing, but a famous one, who refused to answer. His code was therefore rewritten.

As another user mentioned, Super TuxKart is licensed under the GPL and was published on Steam, so it is evidently possible under the right circumstances. I don't imagine it involved relicensing, but Valve's wording seemed to suggest that copyright holders needed to agree to make an exception for the SDK. That also seems unlikely to have happened in the case of Super Tux Kart.

Looks like Steam pulled it, at least US region sales.

Yes Steam pulled it, noted right at the top of the article.

So I went around and asked STK, Super Tux, Warzone 2100 Zero-K and Wesnoth.

Zero-K:

Does anyone know if Zero-K had to relicense before going on Steam?

ZK did not relicense before going to Steam and afaict this kind of threat was never evaluated

My question is more along the line of can a gpl2/ccbysa project go on steam without CLA

Plenty others did i think. Wesnoth is gplv2 and is on Steam

Ah:

Another case is when you have an optional feature to interface with a proprietary application on the system, for example a FOSS communication program that has the functionality to access the address books of third-party applications, including proprietary ones like Outlook. In this case the library isn't required at all for the main functionality.
If steam is optional this interpretation lets you off the hook

Note that you'd probably be violating the GPL if you use any third-party GPL code or libraries unless the proprietary library is part of the operating system. So don't use third-party GPL code and third-party proprietary code together. (Of course, if you're not distributing the third party library OR you're using only your own code, it would probably be legal, but you'd be building a software combination that's illegal to distribute in a working form.)

SuperTuxKart:

Stan most contributed stk agreeded on that, the rest will be cleared after 🇦🇶 is taken out Actually stan supertux project is a better asker

SuperTux:

SuperTux does not use Steam's library, which is proprietary
Some people said the author of PhysFS also did a library that would allow GPL apps to use Steam's library, but I haven't looked into it

It seems he did https://github.com/icculus/steamshim so at worst we could use that.

Wesnoth:

my understanding is that it's not an issue since we don't use the steamworks sdk for anything.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading/distributing_opensource says

But I saw a GPL-licensed application on Steam!
This can happen if the author of the code that is GPL-licensed has given the permission to do so. The author can of course always (a) decide to grant Valve a different license than the author grants everyone else or (b) decide that what the Steamworks SDK does is just a communication with a service that does not invoke the copyleft requirement of the GPL.

but we just plain don't use the sdk in the first place

Asking cause 0 A.D. has no CLA
So we can't get the consent of all past and dead contributors to do it
It seems to me like it's possible but I have yet to find a source that actually does it ^^

yeah, wesnoth has no CLA either, so we couldn't relicense even if we wanted to.
well, technically contributors agree to "GPL 2 or later", so if needed at some point we can say it's GPL 3 rather than GPL 2
but that'd be it

If you're curious how that relicensing exercise panned out for VLC (they did get it relicensed in the end), here's their press release on the matter: https://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html

Yeah I remember reading about this. It was when I looked for the apple store. Most of the links I consulted then are in that question.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple-allowed-to-distribute-gplv3-licensed-software-through-its-ios-app-store

Asked BAR as well and they said they were waiting for that roadmap to finish:

We have a checklist of stuff we wanna do before Steam
You only have one shot at it and we wanna makes sure it is in the best shape possible (and infra is ready for the influx)
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release

Asked Warzone 2100 as well seems like they have a copy cat that do not bother to update it.

Nothing done through or with the Steam build supports the project, unfortunately.
A brief summary of the history of the Steam build, and the individual who uploaded it:
- We reached out prior to his release with an offer to collaborate, and raising potential concerns and issues. He was fairly unreceptive and is now largely unresponsive.
- He packaged the 3.3.0 public release, but incorrectly, so we can’t really even help debug issues with it. He continues to leave the package with outdated releases.
- Legitimate questions / concerns on the Steam forums continue to go missing (i.e. are deleted), instead of being addressed, as relayed to us by numerous community members.
- At the moment we're far more focused on working on improving the game and the infrastructure around it to support all of our new contributors.
- So we encourage folks to avoid the Steam release and just download directly from wz2100.net, GitHub, or SourceForge.

TLDR; Seems it's possible, with or without hacks depending on that SDK linking issue.


But in our case that doesn't solve the infrastructure problem and the fact that a huge number people on the lobby could kill the lobby VM and all the other services we have running on our server, and that the lag in late game could be a major turn off for players, ruining the reputation of the game on steam and elsewhere.

A question we get often is how many developers are there working on 0 A.D. to which the answer is it's complicated. There is a big contribution bar to match the level of quality we want to achieve, and there are few resources to review and ensure that the contributions match the criteria.

We have two senior C++ senior devs, and one of them is mostly AFK, the rest is junior to mid level and cannot review the contributions we actually need, such as threading and other performance improvements that could make it so we can go on platforms to get more players.

Ubuntu has a paywall for their OS download

RedHat charges yearly licenses and the Linux Kernel doesn't flip out on them for it.

Never seen a paywall for Ubuntu. And you can get a free developer download for Redhat.

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Ubuntu has a paywall for their OS download

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Just checked, and at the moment they don't have one. As far as I know, they never had one. The "worst" I recall having seen from canonical in this area is a pre-download donation request which was easily skipped.

I think it's a perfect opportunity to thank Wildfire Games for this gem that is 0 A.D, one of the first open-source RTS that was actually really good-looking and fun to play back then (more than) 10 years ago.

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Ubuntu has a paywall for their OS download

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Just checked, and at the moment they don't have one. As far as I know, they never had one. The "worst" I recall having seen from canonical in this area is a pre-download donation request which was easily skipped.

Yeah, no clue why someone ever thought there was a paywall for it. Hell, they used to offer sending you physical CDs for free. I know, I still have some.

First of all, sorry for replying to an old comment but I don't visit GOL often any more.

[...]3. The Legal Angle

On #3 -- the Legal Angle -- strictly speaking there is nothing wrong with charging money for GPL software.[...]

There are two types of copyrights - I'm not sure what's the legal term in English but one type is money related and the other one is bragging rights. You can never get rid off bragging rights - you're the author and you cannot "sell" or "give away" being an author.

I'm not really sure what you're referencing or which region of the world.

Most if not all of the EU, I guess. It seems the proper English name for the personal aspect of authorship (bragging) is "moral rights" or sometimes "personal copyrights" and the proper English name for the economic aspect of it is just "copyright" or "proprietary copyrights". What I meant is one cannot pretend to be the author even if they have obtained the right to sell a piece of code. Of course one can just take a GPL licensed project and put it on Steam for money but they have to put it there as themselves and if they do so "as is" without asking the original authors for a special lease or some kind of one-off license, they'll most certainly violate parts of the project that aren't GPL licensed, like media files or trademarks.

So no, strictly speaking it's not okay, to just "redistribute" the project and take money for it.

I know it seems shitty, but people charge to redistribute FOSS all the time.

Not really. What people charge for is mostly the work around the project, e.g. services they provide like hosting or support. Also they don't pretend to be the author and they clearly attribute the authors + distribute the source code and license. And if they do change the source (to fit their packaging) they do so in general manner and send the patches upstream. If they wouldn't, AFAIK it'd violate most of FOSS licenses.

ZorinOS ( https://zorin.com/os/pro/purchase/ ) is a distro which packages and sells collections of free software.

Ardour ( https://community.ardour.org/download?platform=win&architecture=x86_64&type=compiled ) sells copies of its software when you select Windows or Mac installation.

ElementaryOS had a paywall to download their OS ( And then all of you flipped out on them )

Ubuntu has a paywall for their OS download

RedHat charges yearly licenses and the Linux Kernel doesn't flip out on them for it.

They're a distribution. When you put work in compiling packages together, integrating them, preparing an installer, a set of guidelines for how to put new packages into your distribution, often a dedicated package manager, when you host your own repositories, on top of that provide support, etc., you can take money for it even if all of the software you compiled together is free of charge.

FlatHub could easily have a free repository with [ slow speed ] and one with [ fast speed ] and throttle the slow one and sell access to the [ fast speed ] legally to make a quick buck -- the same goes for any Linux distro with repos. It would be 100% legal.

Absolutely, as long as they don't pretend to be the authors of that software and they only act as a mirror and everything in their repository is actually licensed in a way that allows for that distribution. Mind you games, i.e. media files, often aren't.

There's really not much difference between a maintainer who repackages for Steam or a FOSS Game and then shoves it into the AUR ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/0ad-git ), or Debian ( https://packages.debian.org/stable/0ad )

Both are repackaging and redistributing.

AUR is distributing installation scripts (PKGBUILDs) and not the software itself. That software is being downloaded by said scripts from the original authors or from different repositories. It's more like someone here posting a link to a software instead of the software itself (e.g. a link to GitLab instead of the content of a source file). Also maintainers are often people directly involved in a project or sometimes there's an explicit permission for adding a project to a repository included in the package (especially when it comes to media files).

It'd have to be "redistributed" under a different name and with at least some (if not all) media files replaced or missing.

Not really. If there were a AppImage and they simply redistributed it without modification AFAIK that would fulfill all obligations just fine.

If you ZIP a directory full of mixed licensed files it doesn't absolve you of the obligation of keeping to that licensing. If you link to a ZIP file hosted by someone else, it's okay. I'd guess it's the same with AppImages. And FOSS licensing mostly lets you do it as long as you do so free of charge and e.g. attribute the original project.

On top of that a clear attribution to original product would have to be made.

This is a moral argument, which directly contradicts the part you wrote before ("It'd have to be "redistributed" under a different name") -- which go ahead and argue it, i'm not going to disagree -- but again from my original post I prefer to stick to the legal requirements.

Yeah, I agree the way I wrote it in that post is unclear. IMHO it'd have to legally be one or the other. Either all of the parts of the project that aren't licensed for direct redistribution would have to be replaced - that includes titles, trademarks, media files - or individual licenses for above mentioned parts would have to be fulfilled however needed, e.g. by proper attribution.

Well, what I meant before is either now clear or even more convoluted but I hope it's the former. It's hard to speak about such matters when you aren't native with a law degree on top and possibly the whole matter is regarded in the foreign legal system.


Last edited by cprn on 8 December 2022 at 12:06 pm UTC