Hmm. Cider and the LGPL

[Jason Green]

> Hi Jason,
> on the off chance the rest of Transgaming hasn't already
> seen those two pages, please circulate the links.
>

One of the problems is that [to my knowledge,] we don't have any
fluent German speakers in the company, so we wouldn't even know *how*
to respond to those articles.  :)

> it'd be nice to have responses to questions like
> "The LGPL seems to give users the right to remove
> the LGPL'd portions of Cider from game A and use it
> with other apps.  The gamers who are currently doing this
> are also copying proprietary parts of Cider, which isn't allowed.
> How will Transgaming prevent the copying of the proprietary
> parts of Cider without preventing the copying or modification
> of the LGPL portions?".
>

The EULA included in all games which are shipped using Cider
technology spells out how each of the pieces of the Cider framework
are licensed.  It includes the folders which have LGPL'd WineHQ code
and lists all of the various MIT/BSD-style licenses for other
components.  Any components which require source re-distribution (such
as those licensed under the LGPL) are available on the public CVS
site.

All of the license details can also be found on the public CVS site.
We know that some people are creating their own "home-brew" Cider
packages for other games, but they obviously cannot distribute these
packages legally (in most countries, at least).  It does take a fair
bit of work to put together a custom package that actually works, and
many of these apparently require hacked EXEs to get around other
games' copy protection techniques.

We do make customizations to the Cider engine and optimizations for
each game that we port, so these "home-brew" games will never be as
high quality as they could be.  At the moment, there isn't much of a
real issue to be worried about.  People have pirated software on every
platform that's ever been made, so I don't see why Macs would be any
different.  Not that we condone software piracy (ahem, *copyright
violations*, that is) by any means, but in this case, it's mostly a
non-issue.

I'm not sure if that answers your question or not, but hopefully it
clears it up a little bit.  If a user wants to use only the LGPL parts
of Cider, they will need to extract just those folders and leave the
rest of the code alone.  However, they'd probably have a hard time
running a DirectX-based game without any of the D3D* libraries or many
of the other non-LGPL pieces.

> And maybe even get the answer back to the authors of those pages.
>

Anyone who speaks German is invited to respond to these types of
articles and point them to our website and PR department.  To my
knowledge, I don't believe that these authors attempted to contact us
prior to writing their articles.

> That ought to calm the waters.
>

Nah, this is the Internet... there's always a storm brewing somewhere.  ;-)

Jason Green
Developer, TransGaming, Inc.