Showing posts with label OGEd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OGEd. Show all posts

Saturday, October 4, 2008

An Open Source Legal Breakthrough

Good day for the OpenSource movement : 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.'

Here is the Slashdot story and the original court content can be found at JMRI Defense: Court Papers (http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/index.shtml).

This is only in the US but as they are the most litigious for frivolous reason this should protect most of the open source community :D

What is frightening is that Katzer patented and started sending invoices to Jacobsen for work that Jacobsen did! And it took a whole court procedure to defend Jacobsen...

It should be obvious in this case that Katzer should be condemned for extortion!

However the most pertinent comment in my opinion is the following:

"This was an appeals court decision. The appeals court doesn't decide all those things. The legal issue was whether the license was enforceable under copyright law, or whether it was a "mere covenant," meaning that Jacobsen would get nothing because he was not making money off the software. The lower court had ruled that it was a mere covenant. On appeal, the Federal Circuit vacated that ruling, which means it now goes back to the trial court to apply the "correct" law as announced by the Fed. Cir.

Two takeaway lessons, one for Big Business, and one for developers. For Big Business, you can't infringe on the copyrights of open source developers with impunity. For developers, even if you are doing open source software, REGISTER YOUR COPYRIGHT. If you register your copyright up front, you can get statutory damages and attorney fees if some idiot from Big Business decides to try this kind of stunt. Those damages are almost always more than the "actual" damages you'll get for software that you give away for free (as in beer). If you wait until after somebody infringes before you file your copyright, it's too late. And registering is cheap and easy [copyright.gov]. In many cases, you don't even need to get an attorney involved (although if you need a patent or trademark or help with a copyright, I know this really great IP attorney who also posts on Slashdot and is clued in on open source. [jw.com]

And despite the stuff above that may look like 'advice" to the untrained eye, this post absolutely, positively is NOT legal advice."

Fortunately for OGE we have a dual license and we intent to get payments for the commercial license :)

More depressing is this following comment implying that this "Breakthrough" is very limited in scope.


Thursday, September 4, 2008

Dystopia Studios

Wow big day.

I created my company: www.dystopiastudios.com

What can I say?
It seems a bit surealistic that I did it after the ages I dream of it.

I think I deserve my last calm evening for the next few years :D

Btw I trademarked the name "dystopia studios" :D

Now I must think about a nice logo.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

My first mesh... and a comment from my son

Half a day to create my first mesh it should be a wagon... and I have no idea if this is a good performance or not :D

So that I can remember how I did it, here is a short description of the steps needed to create this image with Ogre, Blender and visualise the result in OGEd:

  1. Launch Blender and try to use it.
  2. Search online Blender tutorial to understand the most basic commands: Blender User Interface Tutorial, Modelling A Cube, Selecting Meshes and Using Textures.
  3. Struggling like hell to select faces, rescaling, subdividing to create more faces, destroy some faces to create doors and windows, ...
  4. Repeating step 3 several times.
  5. Reread 'Using Textures' to understand how to apply textures.
  6. Save and repeat steps 3-5 until you get this wagon. Forget about making a complex multiple windows wagons.
  7. Using the steps on "Blender to Ogre" to determine how to export the mesh:
    1. Copy the Pyhton script from ogrenew/tools/BlenderExport to the blender folder
    2. Read the documentation in BlenderExport/ogrehelp/ogremeshesexporter.html
    3. Realise that Blender must have a version newer than 2.44 (mine is 2.43)
    4. Download Blender, reinstall it, reload the mesh.
    5. Realise that I didn't compile OgreXmlConverter (/ogrenew/tools/XMLConverter)
    6. Install OgreXmlConverter and set up the mesh exporter correctly.
    7. I said correctly.
    8. .... no mesh appear in the exporter.... lose time to understand that you need to select the object and click Update if you want the mesh to be exported.
  8. (Repeat from step 5 because there was no textures on some faces...)
  9. At last the export works and here are:
    1. MyMesh.mesh.xml and
    2. MyMesh.material
  10. Now you must convert it to a .mesh so that Ogre can understand it. So you search the doc to find that you need XMLConverter again.
  11. In a console you type "OgreXmlConverter MyMesh.mesh.xml" and you get MyMesh.xml
  12. You load the mesh, material and texture in a mesh viewer (OGEd for example).
  13. .... and you see that the mesh is turned 90 degree on its x axis.... Bags!
  14. You find that the ogre addons MeshMagick can rotate a mesh.
  15. You try to compile it and stumbles on a compile error...
    1. You check the code and see that this can't compile.
    2. So you make a quick fix (who needs to convert mesh skeleton anyway... humpf... I will need to compile this correctly at one time).
    3. You type a bug report about this skeleton bug.
  16. You rotate it... in the wrong direction... redo it.
  17. Reload all in OGEd and... yes it shows correctly.
That was easy - I will watch a movie now.

Comment from my son (3.5 years old) "Dady doesn't even know how to make wheels!". I will disinherit him...

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

OGEd - Open Game Editor (aka Ogre/OGE Editor) open sourced!

OGEd is now open-source :)

OGEd stands for Open Game Editor but at this stage it is more an Ogre Resource Editor and will evolve into an OGE Editor before becoming a true versatile Open Game Editor :D

You can get it on the OGE sourceforge as code or binary.

Of course there are still lots to do and any help would be great.
If you are interested you can look on the oge wiki for more information like todo list, planned features, how to compile, etc.
http://www.opengameengine.org/wiki

Originally I took inspiration from the Ogre project name "Material Editor" and 5 files that allowed Ogre script edition were really interesting.
So I proposed to the Ogre owner -Sinbad- that we exchange some code so that both could benefit - I thought it was a win-win proposal. I was wrong.

His answer disappointed me. As I want to be able to distribute OGEd under our OGE unlimited license -which I can't if I must keep Ogre license and copyright- I was obliged to remove ANY code that could be interpreted as being originally from the Material Editor :(

This attitude is bit to near to the "SCO versus Linux" for my taste. This is not how I idealise the open source movement. For me if someone is willing to exchange worthwhile code I am more than happy to give mine. Saving time is the most important thing in live! I am not immortal! In my opinion copyrights and licenses are primarily a way to protect my work from people patenting it and then trying to stop me using my code or even making me pay for the work I did! I use them to protect me against crooks and felons.


This lead me to read some legal texts about using existing code without infringing copyright & license. And I found this legal review from the ReactOS project: http://www.reactos.org/en/dev_legalreview.html (ReactOS is a nice project btw I hope it will reach the stage where VC runs on it).

This point is fairly obvious but IMO hard to achieve as C++ programmers are increasingly using the same coding style:

Developers are encouraged to NOT attempt to copy the coding style of non-free code. While coding style may not covered by copyright, a similar or identical coding style to a piece of non-free code casts suspicion on the new code.


This experience made me realise that the "Tainted Developers" theory is nearly unavoidable and I was not able to explain my position to Sinbad. So to avoid again a "SCO versus linux" issue I will avoid reading ANY copyrighted code from now on.

"Tainted Developers". There is a legal theory that is occasionally cited in the context of producing a work-alike implementation of a published copyrighted work. There is concern that, if the creators of the new work have seen the original work, they will be unable to create a similar work without infringing the copyright of the original. It is the position of the Project that this theory is invalid for a number of reasons. As a general rule, there is no reason that a developer who has seen non-free code cannot write logically similar code for ReactOS.

What a lose of time and effort - I hate to reinvent the wheel.