Open letter to Aphelion

Hello @Aphelion3371. I'm glad you liked my wizard mod. But maybe word "took" would be more appropriate, since you weren't grateful enough to even like its thread. However, I'd like to point out that you managed to violate every single part of it's license. In case you didn't read it - it is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, with additional clause that colours my nickname orange on severs using that mod.
It has 3 terms:

• if you decide to use work under this license in your other work, you "must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use." You did none of this. In fact you even tried to claim authorship of my wizard mod, by adding following comments in my source files:
• work under it may not be used for commercial purposes. You violated this term too, by trying to monetize my mode by selling VIPs on your server.
• if you modify, transform, or build upon my wizard mod, you must distribute your contributions under the same free license as the original. However, you violated this too, by trying to impose your non-free license, as seen above.

You also failed to fulfil obligation of colouring my nick orange on your server that uses my wizard mod, but i don't care about this part, since i never visit your server anyway. You probably also copied wizard animations made by @Diprog, without crediting him for his work.

Congratulations, you managed to steal something that was free anyway.

And here comes the best part: since you included my wizard mod in your roleplay mod the Share Alike part of the license requires you to publish it under the same free license. Which means anyone can freely use your roleplay mod, without your permission, as long as he complies with the CC-BY-NC-SA license! Thanks for putting so much work into this, our great kag community will surely benefit from it. I could even include changes you made to my wizard mod into the next update, but unfortunately they are below my quality standards.

Now you have 2 options: you may exclude my wizard mod from your roleplay mod so it releases you from complying with free license and continue being a selfish dick no one likes.
OR, you could change your attitude and start sharing things you create with our community.

 

I'm not going to pretend to know whether he took it or not, but I was under the following impressions.

1. He used a recolored necromancer as the base sprite for his mod.
2. He coded the mod to work completely differently from your mod. As I recall, yours was some thing that spawned when players got to a certain point on the scoreboard and a timer popped up, it was overpowered, teleported instead of invisibility (And I recall it using the Necromancer skin?), and was designed to be a Hero-style class instead of a normal class. A lot of this is fairly tiny technical edits to mechanics though so I could conceivably see it as being used and edited by Aph.
3. Never heard of Diprog's mod. I think you should have linked that but I'll look at it.

I told Aph that having a ViP donation service would come around to bite him in the ass though '3'


Edit: Yeah, not seeing what part of the mod he took from you, exactly. The sprites are different and yours is literally the Necromancer. Would you point that out for everyone? Also can't find Diprog's mod either. Seriously, he hasn't posted anything.

 

I just question whether he sent a pm first or said "let's cause drama" and posted. Having actually, you know, been there when Aph was first designing the wizard and helping him with balance testing, months and months ago, I'm not 100% clueless. I seriously doubt he stole it as I was with him testing for over 4 weeks before we made it public. He's being accused of sprite theft that isn't posted anywhere on the forums (That I can find, and I searched 5 terms and looked at all Diprog's posts) and code theft when I was there as he designed the wizard.

Seems like pointless drama when this could have easily been a PM. But sure, I'll stay out after this post.

 

Honestly this kind of thing should be brought up to the community. He deserves to be called out on shit like this.

 

i assure you this was exactly what happened, ask other testers

if you want proofs you can just compare files in his mod with mine, eg. WizardMagicOrb.as from my mod and OrbTick.as from his. my mod is available in resources section. you would have to join his server to get his mod though.

 

Your post is misleading, I used mere snippets of your orb code in my scripts (they aren't entirely yours as your code is based on the original Necromancer script) but everything else was based on the Necromancer, both mods were based on the Necromancer that's why they seem so similar. You're going too far saying that I stole your mod entirely.

All donations go to the upkeep of the server. My mod does not exist for commercial purposes.

I don't want anymore drama, you'll be credited for your code and I apologize for not having done so already. I'm already planning to release my Roleplay mod after Viridi Militis is done, not because if I don't I'm a "selfish dick".

??

• norill assumes that I stole animations by Diprog
• BlueLuigi says "so you can go back to riding that taffy butt" (I'm not taffy butt and lets not get into that discussion)

@BlueLuigi you make me want to leave

really?

 

the fact that you can't read basic English is a big problem and one of the reasons you need to stop posting in these such threads

 

You can't find "Diprog's mod" cause it's called as "The FUN CTF" tiny.cc/funservers. If admin thinks that it's spam you can delete this message :). It makes no sense to post FUN mod in recources because nobody can use any part of this mod. Did Aphelion3371 steal animations? I need to check it. No, he didn't. Compare "FUN" mod wizard, necromancer and "RP" mage.

 

I'm just curious as to what "commercial" means in this sense. In a way, you are making money off the server in that it is less money that you have to pay out of your pocket for the server. You are not gaining a profit technically, but you are still receiving money.

Although, if you receive enough "donations" to cover your server costs, which they could, what would happen to the money that exceeds the amount needed to maintain your server? I understand that you could simply say "It goes to any future server costs", but you still essentially are now gaining a profit from the server.

Sorry if it is not place place to step in, I am just curious as to the general rules on this issue; or if these rules still even apply since you stated that you used "snippets" rather than the entirety of the code.

 

So when norill states that, is he correct in this statement? That, he is not allowed to have any form of VIP services that require payment? @LordReudh

 

If Aphelion is really just using "mere snippets of your orb code" then I consider that as fair use. Fair use is permitted no matter what license you use.

(This quote is in Aphelions favor, as he's probably not making a profit from donations).

 

As I can understand their posts weren't the most usefull in here, norill clearly made a open letter in the forum. Telling them they shouldn't post in here is a bit non-sense. Posting such a thing in here was clearly going to bring that kind of stuff. It would even be better if it was just locked and taken privately with those guys.

If norill was asking for a more serious/private conversation, he had the choice to pm him with a mod or something to make them aware of the situation.

He may deserve it but it just bring bullshit, this thread is such a drama maker.

 

this is not what a "public domain" is. public domain is when intellectual property rights have expired, because the author is long dead. as you can see, i'm pretty alive. also the way how the work is being distributed doesn't influence its license. anyway, someone call @Boxpipe.

The whole orb control code is mine, way too much to be called "a snippet". Oracle once sued Google over 9 lines of stolen code.

Also Fair use is a very vague term in US law, so it is hard to draw a clear line on what's fair and what's not. In other countries this term is a bit better defined, and it says that fair use include using fragments of work for educational purposes, in a news report, in a quote justified by "explaining, critical analysis, teaching or laws of work's genre" or in a satire. None of this apply in our case.
But both US and other countries' law agree that if you use other works for personal gain then it's most certainly not fair use. And some people seem to forget, that personal gains are not only material. I've seen pubs praise Aphelion for his "omg best mod evr11" There is a sample from his profile page:

(i'm not making this up, his name really is xXLONGSHOTXx lol)
This seems wrong when not all this "good work" is his work. Especially when he advertises his server like this in it's thread:

We could argue over this fair use, public domain and other legal gibberish whole day, but what's the point? I've released my mod to community for free, I only want credit for the work i put into it. Is that too much? Can't you show just a little bit of gratitude?

 

There is no point for this thread other then public shame. IMO norill has no grounds to argue on , the necromancer was a creation of the devs. Tweak some scripts and now you own it .