On Thu Apr 12 17:13, Jason Spiro wrote: > All, do you agree it would be a good idea to upload: > > * a fretsonfire package, > * and another package with two or three Debian-Free songs packaged for > fretsonfire > > into unstable for now? Frets on Fire is a popular game (the current > Windows FOF installer has been downloaded more than 230,000 times[1]) > and it'd be good to get it into Debian even before this issue is > resolved. :-) > > If so, which songs? I suggest we pick any few Free songs (some of the > ones at http://keyboardsonfire.net/?songs surely are Free, I can ask > the webmaster if you want) that aren't too difficult to for newbies to > succeed at.
I agree it would be good to get it into Debian ASAP. The way I can see
this going is: a program package, a free data package and a package in
non-free with all the upstream songs in. The licence will need to be
changed to one which we can at least distribute with before that last
happens.
The problem with the free data package is finding good songs which are
actually free. What I have found from the keyboardsonfire.net songs is
that they mostly fall into (at least one of) a few categories:
1. frets only (no audio files)
2. not free (often random commercial songs people are blatantly violating
the copyright for and a quick poll of the site indicates no
licence information in either the downloads or anywhere on the
website)
3. don't have a proper guitar track -- this really does spoil the
gameplay. I've not found a good solution short of actually
recording the guitar separately
4. The frets are just not very goo d(not well timed, interesting
etc).
I wouldn't say any of those were appropriate for distributing as our
main set of data files. Even the ones which the original artist has
posted them, we will have to go to them and get them licenced under a
properly free licence which allows modification, which some of them may
not want (it's certainly not the case that by posting them on
keyboardsonfire.net they grant such). For the song and the frets
authors. Asking the webmaster is likely to be pointless, he's not the
copyright holder, if there isn't an explicit copyright licence in the
download for all the frets and audio we have to go back to them anyway.
If you've found any appropriate songs which you think pass all of those,
do let me know.
Matt
--
Matthew Johnson
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