Specify license

[Wuzzy2]

What is the license of this game (code and artwork)?

Is this game free software or open source software (according to the Free Software Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Definition or Open Source Definition https://opensource.org/osd)?

I request to add this information into the README file somewhere.

[Wuzzy2]

Another thing: The README currently calls the game “freeware”. If the game is free software, this term should be avoided (some folks assume all freeware is proprietary).

[v1993]

LICENSE.md, huh?

As for data, god know their license. Original authors don't.

[Wuzzy2]

Does “data” include the levels?

[qwertychouskie]

I'm aware of the license issues with the assets, my plan is to find all the original asset authors and ask them to license it under CC-BY-SA 4.0 International. It will likely take a long time to complete, but I'll try to at least start on it soon. I'll probably start with the music as it's all on Newgrounds.

AFAIK the levels are GPL, just the media needs to be figured out.

[Wuzzy2]

Good to know. Yeah, this sounds like a long and painful process indeed. :-/

[v1993]

That's what original authors said:

Email 1:

Hello,

thank you for your interest in our old project. But in the last years, we have already worked on a brand new version which uses a new code and totally new textures, levels and music. The main reason for this was the fact that we finally want to release our game on Steam and even make some money out of that, so we had to redesign every little bit ourselves, because for Cubosphere, we had just used music, textures etc we found on the internet. In order to avoid copyright issues, we started again from scratch. Now we are nearly finished and almost ready to publish it. With that in mind, handing away our old project (with levels, texture packs etc from others) is something we simply cannot do right now, sorry.

Email 2:

Hello again,

thanks! In its prime, there were two other people who contributed levels to the main episode of Cubosphere. Since we haven't heard from them for years now, we decided to leave their levels out in the new project completely. Unfortunately, I can't name you the levels which are not from me. Concerning those, I would appreciate it if you would not use them, because they will be the core of the new game.

The music of Cubosphere was completely taken from Newgrounds. com and belongs to various artists there. For the new game, we therefore hired a separate single artist who designed the whole new music. As for the textures, around 95% of the textures and skyboxes (background) were taken from the web.
Long story short: If you want to avoid any copyright issues, you should not use any of the music, textures and levels.
As for the code, I'm not the expert, because I am merely the designer. I will contact my co-developer, discuss the matter and then answer you again (or he will do it). He started the whole project.

[SusDTSteve]

i think they have used the same liscense from the first alpha and to the last beta (will look into it, dont worry)

[SusDTSteve]

GNU General Public License (probably for the textures and sounds)
music is probably under the "newgrounds" license (whatever that is)