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2024-04-17_7935_0_backlabs1.md

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  • Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 23:56:10 +0000
  • From: "backlabs1 (@backlabs1)" gitlab@mg.gitlab.com
  • Subject: openmw | TES3MP has changed the license, adding additional restrictions (#7935)

Hi,

I have contributed a few small changes to the TES3MP project and hope to contribute more in the future (I have a TES3MP fork on Codeberg). It is important to me that my contributions, anywhere in the TES3MP repository, be merge-able to upstream OpenMW without any legal hassle or questions; I have understood that to be the goal of the TES3MP project also. It was quite surprising to me then to find that on 2021-04-18, TES3MP commits f6887559f6 and cf4ff3513f changed the TES3MP license from the standard GPLv3 used by OpenMW to a GPLv3 license with additional section 7 restrictions. The upstream OpenMW license is no longer present in the TES3MP repository, but changes from upstream OpenMW have still been merged in to TES3MP.

While the GPLv3 section 7 terms do permit some very specific additional restrictions to be used for code added to a forked project, it is not acceptable for a GPLv3 licensee to change the license for code that they do not hold the copyright for, except with permission from all copyright holders. I am opening this issue here because OpenMW authors are among the affected copyright holders. Of course there are others too, such as all TES3MP contributors from the fork to commit f6887559f6 and OpenMW VR project contributors (see the TES3MP VR branch).

I opened issue 685 on the TES3MP GitHub tracker for discussing the matter, hoping it was a misunderstanding that could be easily resolved. However, after some discussion that issue was deleted. Here is an archive.org snapshot showing all comments prior to the deletion and a here is the next snapshot of the deleted issue about 12 hours later.

Since discussion on the TES3MP project has failed, I would appreciate any helpful feedback here regarding how this can be resolved. I would like the TES3MP project to be successful and do not want it to be hindered by any legal issues, particularly with regard to any TES3MP changes that at any point in the future may be acceptable to be merged into OpenMW.

Thank you, backlabs1