Calena wrote:Branan's post from way back in September 2011 on the OU forums addresses this from a content creator's POV. My take-away from reading and studying this is that unless we're prepared to release the original Max/Blender file and give away all rights to our work, do not use any type of Cyan asset, including textures and/or models:
Link to Original ThreadIn reading the various forums, I'm seeing that shard owners and unskilled builders are voicing their preference that everything be freely available to everyone. I agree that it would make their lives much easier. Mine, not so much. I'm not that nice
Calena, this doesn't apply in any way. Branan's post was a hypothetical, as Cyan has not yet officially licensed their assets to the public. It certainly doesn't apply to the discussion in this thread regarding Plasma or any plugins used to create content. Also, you
do not "give away all rights to your work" under the GPL, or any other license. Only by granting your work into the public domain explicitly is that even remotely similar (and even then it's not completely recognized the world over). If you license your work under the GPL
you retain all ownership rights to it, but you have granted
others the right to use your work under those terms, and likewise
if you use someone else's work licensed under the GPL you may use their portions providing you abide by the terms they have granted them to you.
This is easily demonstrated by the necessity of contacting all authors who have contributed to the codebase and asking permission to re-license their collective contributions when the Plasma license was fixed.
At any rate, please be very careful when recommending a course of action to others that doesn't take into account the actual reality of the license. Personally I think the GPL is not a very good license for this kind of content, but that hasn't happened, and even if it did, it wouldn't work quite the way you predict.