Hacker News Reader

Comment by aavotins | Hacker News Reader

What caught my eye immediately is their licence agreement that prohibits using the engine to develop, quoting "Serious games". That's a rather vague and broad statement, what's a serious game?

View on HN

1.10. “Serious Games”, i.e. ‘games’ which are not developed for the sole purpose of entertainment but for purposes training, simulation, science, architecture etc.

How is 'purpose' a legal term? What is the purpose of a game? To milk money from fans? To obey to some company's internal schedule? To entertain..... review sites? To entertain me? To showcase technology? To insert subliminal messages and DRM? All of the above? None?

What was the purpose of tamagotchis?

We may never know.

>What was the purpose of tamagotchis? We may never know.

But we can breath a sigh of relief that whatever it was, we beat them in the end.

From what I've seen, courts are frequently asked to answer questions just like this one. They do not seem to be as troubled by slippery slopes because it's their job to decide where the line is.

If you're a student using CryEngine you're probably not worth suing for copyright infringement (at worst a C&D maybe). If you're a corporate entity who is distributing a game which licenses CryEngine, you certainly may be worth suing for infringement.

Which subsection restricts a corporate entity from distributing a game built on CryEngine?

There are restrictions on Serious Games, but amusingly a Serious Game isn't a game.

I disagree, re: serious game. It's why we have the term gamification. Taking something mundane and making it, for my lack of a better term, gamey.

I'm thinking of things like Starfighters.

There is a section[0] of the licence[1] which allows students to develop a Serious Game, but not for profit.

[0] 2.2. If you are a student or a member of an academic institution you are in addition entitled to develop Serious Games using CryEngine and to render such Serious Games in object code form (including the CryEngine Assets and the CryEngine Redistributables) pursuant to the CryEngine documentation. However, you are in no case entitled to commercially exploit such Serious Games without Crytek’s explicit prior written approval.

[1] https://www.cryengine.com/ce-terms

It is probably an arse covering measure. If someone uses the engine for serious work and it somehow fails, there isn't a route to ask them to cover financial/other damages because they told you not to use it that way (and you agreed not to use it that way via this license).

Game engine companies actually tend to have separate licenses for Serious Games, with different terms and costs. This is because a Serious Game is often unlikely to be mass-market - at the extreme end of the scale, it might be developed for only one client to ever use.

Games without physics, not Turing complete and no building. Bye Minecraft, for one. Garry's Mod too.

At that point are they even games anymore?

Kerbal Space Program?

If you read the Visual Studio EULA, which I did when the first Visual Studio .Net version came out, it described in a long and complicated text a certain type of software which you aren't allowed to compile with it. I don't know if this changed in the meantime because I have only read one EULA and that was it, but the software described neatly formulated the conditions of copyleft licensing. So in essence Visual Studio .Net forbade one from building things like GPL software. I'm sure the Visual Studio .Net EULA is available somewhere to dig this up.

What I'm getting at is that this isn't the worst license from a commercial-first software distributor.

I never heard of such a thing as VS prohibiting the compilation of GPL code.

It didn't say GPL. There was a long section describing code of certain kind, which was a long-winded description for the rules of copyleft, and then a reference to that type (call it X) which may not be fed into MSVC. Like I said this was the EULA for Visual Studio .Net (the first version) and probably more than a decade ago. And as I said also, I don't have the newer EULAs so cannot look for the same section in those. I wish I had saved a copy back then but I wasn't as professional, sorry.

> So in essence Visual Studio .Net forbade one from building things like GPL software. I'm sure the Visual Studio .Net EULA is available somewhere to dig this up.

Maybe I miss something, but you literally said that they didn't allow one to build GPL software.

I wrote "things like GPL" and said it described the copyleft licensing without naming the prominent license.

But I cannot find a version of the first (2001 or 2002) EULA, so it's possible my memory isn't exact.

Edit: All I could find https://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/08/04/132221/more-ms-eula-...

Anyway, given the Microsoft of today, it's doubtful they would try something like that, so this isn't relevant anymore, but it demonstrates that EULAs are written in the language of laws and unrealistic for users to read and grasp correctly. MIT and ISC licenses are simple to understand, whereas GPL and Apache are long and some sections are hard to follow without a law degree. Same issue with EULAs.

You missed the word 'like'. As he is no lawyer he avoided to give a concrete example, but he tried to describe the lawyer speak with a more understandable example. What is your interpretation of the EULA text?

Would this be the thing you're referring to?

  https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/MSVC7

About a paragraph down that page, it mentions the concept of Visual Studio 2003 not being allowed to compiled GPL code, stating that's a misconception.

The original EULA doesn't seem to be online any more though, so it's hard to tell.

I don't know because I can't find the EULA I saw in the installer dialog on Windows myself, so it's pointless for me to speculate, but it's funny because it's the first and last time I read a EULA, while I was waiting for the installer to finish. Since it's written in legal language, and I was much younger and inexperienced/uneducated, I might have fallen for the same incorrect interpretation. Seeing how wireshark has a separate section and I was able to find a Slashdot post, it seems I wasn't the only one who found something curious.

My Google-fu produced the following Microsoft ISVLA from 2009 (not VS-related, but this language appears in several of their EULAs from the 2000s):

http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/Downloader...

> Potentially Viral Software. Your license rights under Agreement and/or Academic Agreement are conditioned upon your compliance with the following terms: You must not: (a) Integrate or otherwise incorporate Potentially Viral Software into, or combine Potentially Viral Software with, any Licensed Product, Software Documentation, or derivative work thereof; (b) distribute Potentially Viral Software in conjunction with any Licensed Product, Software Documentation, or derivative work thereof; or (c) use Potentially Viral Software in the development of any derivative work of any Licensed Product or Software Documentation. “Potentially Viral Software” means software which is licensed pursuant to terms that directly or indirectly (i) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft or our suppliers with respect to the Licensed Products; or (ii) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights or immunities under Microsoft’s or our suppliers’ intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Licensed Products. Potentially Viral Software includes, without limitation, any software that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of such software that other software incorporated into, derived from, or distributed with such software be: (a) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (b) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (c) redistributable at no charge.

I'm not a lawyer, but this term sounds scarier than I think it is. "Potentially Viral Software" is defined to be software under a license that places obligations on Microsoft (which would be every license offered by Microsoft, and no license not offered by Microsoft, so as its only effect is to prevent you from using Microsoft software, it seems an unintelligible term). It goes on to say this "includes... software that requires... [being] distributed in source code form" but that has nothing to do with "Potentially Viral Software" as defined just before.

My gut says Microsoft wrote this term in a manner calculated to confuse drive-by software engineers into believing that VS can't be used to compile GPLed software, that the GPL creates obligations on third parties, or both.

Thanks for digging that up. It reads vaguely familiar. The point of a EULA is for the End User to sign it. If the end user cannot understand it, does this mean they have to ask a lawyer before clicking Next in the installer?

I don't understand your question. "The point" of an EULA is subjective, and depends on your legal strategy, and the exact text of the document. It is generally a good idea to ask a lawyer before agreeing to anything you don't understand. I am not aware of any law requiring one to consult a lawyer before clicking next in an installer.

The whole concept of EULAs that cannot be understood by non-lawyers goes against the aim of having them read and accepted by end users before running an application. The problem is that there's no standard text where it'd say you agree to ISO-XYZ and everyone knows it's a respected and well understood agreement that's in use for all kinds applications already.

There certainly are "respected and well-understood" "standard" texts, for example, the Apache or GPL licenses are widely understood and are used for "all kinds of applications already." The legal analyses of these texts runs into the millions of pages; we know quite a lot about them at this point.

What I believe you misunderstand is that "the aim" or "the whole concept" of an EULA is not to explain things clearly to end users. On the contrary, "the aim" of an EULA is to offer terms that are favorable to the licensor (and thus unfavorable to the end user), and this aim is best accomplished when the user does not especially comprehend the document. In other words, "the aim" of an EULA is to be obfuscatory.

Anyone who wanted to use a standard document has many options to choose from that are probably familiar to you. ISVs who have passed over the ten-or-so standard texts that you are familiar with will not be convinced by an eleventh.

Well, then EULAs as they are done today should be forbidden.

I've read Apache2 and GPL2 licenses and I can't say I comprehend them fully. Read the liability clauses in GPL and Apache licenses and compare them to MIT or BSD.

Saying that licenses should be readable to software developers is like saying sourcecode should be readable to lawyers. It's a nice idea, but in the real world, even problems as simple and universal as loading an image over HTTPS is totally impenetrable to anyone outside the software development profession.

It is the same for the law. Even the basic "email-grade" legal problems are actually very complicated, and it is no good trying to simplify them down to a lay level. I'll defer to Lawrence Rosen on this, from his book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law:

> The same programmers who cringe when a lawyer attempts to write high-quality software feel no qualms about writing their own open source licenses. Their goal, it appears, is to craft something that sounds like a license, to define a form of software freedom with reasonable terms and conditions, and then wait for the community to adopt the license and distribute software under it. This technique sometimes works. Some members of the open source community are more concerned with mak- ing a philosophical statement, getting free software distributed to the world, and letting license enforcement take care of itself somehow in the future. That can be a commendable goal, but from a lawyer’s perspective, it is amateurish and risky.

The reason that BSD/MIT seem readable to you is actually that they lack a lot of clarity on important points. For example, they say nothing at all about patents, which is the primary type of software litigation today. So an Oracle-type could offer you software under an MIT license, and then turn around and sue you under patent law for using the software they offered you. Whether they would win is an interesting question, but we will not find out because you will settle.

Meanwhile, Apache2 or GPL3 or other post-1970s licenses have actual clauses to deal with this. So now your lawyer can print out the license, highlight a sentence, scribble "SEE?" below it, add "Respectfully submitted, John Smith Esq." at the bottom and that is the end of your lawsuit.

If you bought the software and can't understand the EULA, aren't you entitled to legal counsel by the makers? I imagine you could stir up quite a shitstorm if they refuse, i.e. "company X tries to bind you to terms they DENY TO EXPLAIN".

Perhaps the idea is to prevent the linking of binary blobs and/or other code in eg: standard libc, c++ libraries, win32 api that Microsoft provides, with GPL software and then distributing that binary - and so implying that the standard libc and other bits are also under the GPL?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game

I think it's mainly related to Mass Virtual (ex. RealTime Immersive Inc) business that mainly worked on military simulators. At least in past it's was Crytek's company.

http://massvirtual.com/portfolio/video/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Sam

How about anything by TruSim [0] :-)

http://seriousgames.com/

Uh, First thing I saw was .exe on git.

You can still use the src to investigate bugs in source code and walk-around them in your product.

> 1.10. “Serious Games”, i.e. ‘games’ which are not developed for the sole purpose of entertainment but for purposes training, simulation, science, architecture etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com