revOnline and Open Source

[Mark Wilcox]

Dr. Hawkins <dochawk at gmail.com> wrote:


> If they don't contain *any* code, I agree.  If I designed such a file
> format, it would only
> have descriptions of what the user did, and would be pure ascii.

> I can't tell; there are certainly non-ascii characters in there, and I
> just don't know what
> they are.  I *assume* that they're just part of the description . . .


Here's one of many reasons why copyright is so bad for software.  Pure ascii file formats are horrendously inefficient for some types of data, yet if file formats aren't human readable then how is anyone supposed to judge whether or not they contain any copyrighted material?

I think Monte said that the binary parts of the file are just the properties of the various objects serialised.  We could go through the source with a fine-toothed comb to make sure there's no common little bit of code from the engine sources copied into every stack but I don't believe that would create a derivative work in any case.  Every stack will have the common handler definitions too, whether generated by the IDE or typed.  Starting a story "Once upon a time..." doesn't make it a derivative work of the first such story to do so (OK probably a bad example as I'm sure that's out of copyright by now but you get the point).  It's also not in RunRev's interests to have their engine license infect stacks - that wouldn't work well with the commercial license.