The GM License Agreement

[IsmAvatar]

I stated earlier that I got permission from Mark Overmars through a mod.
Here's what he said:

Sorry for not replying earlier. I was first was on holidays and then trying to catch up. I don;t think this is an important issue. Actually .gm6 files are not really protected. And even though I prefer people not to hack them, I cannot see a reason to be worried about this.

Mark

[IsmAvatar]

Mark Overmars made a post today on the GMC regarding projects such as LGM and G-Java.

A link here to read what he said:
forums.gamemaker.nl/index.php?showtopic=199063&view=findpost&p=1401719

His words come of no surprise to me. He was primarily just saying it to aid in the public understanding of these projects, and I greatly appreciate his decision in doing so.

The Game Maker program is about 50.000 lines of code. Making a similar IDE for Linux or Max would result in a similarly sized program.

I agree, LGM will probably require a large number of lines of code. Since LGM will not include a compiler, however, a lot of those lines can be chopped off.

So if you want to write such an IDE yourself, expect that it will take you years of hard work, unles you are an absolute brilliant programmer.

You flatter me. I do plan for it to take a while, but not much longer than a year.

Also there is no guarantee for compatibility in the future. As a result you are going to disappoint many users.

I'll make sure to keep LGM up to date. If anything, Mark, you are going to disappoint many users for not providing the functionality that LGM has.

I love arguing with professors from other countries *S*

[Xenith]

you're so co(c)ky ;D

[IsmAvatar]

I try

[IsmAvatar]

A PM from Mark to TGMG (leader of G-Java)

As I have indicated at many occasions I am not in favor of such projects. The reason is that none of these projects is perfect and I am sure they never will be. This will in the end have a negative impact on Game Maker itself. Also, the existence of such package actually puts a pressure on Game Maker development itself.

So I decided to take this step. Also the license agreement for version 7 will not allow tampering with the gmk files. So I guess you are bound to keep using version 6 for g-java (which I don't think is a problem as the new extension mechanism of version 7 will definitely not work with java).

Mark

As such, LGM and G-Java will abandon GM7 and stick with GM6. We will probably also break apart and create our own file format that will enable things that GM7 and future versions have, as well as be far more efficient, smaller, and possibly compressed.

[Quadduc]

Also the license agreement for version 7 will not allow tampering with the gmk files

I don't think that will have any legal binding whatsoever.

It is a file format, and it's designed to contain other people's work. If I have a game and save it in gm7, I still have the full copyright to that game. And if I later ditch GM 7, I still own the rights to the game, and I have the full right to extract it from the GM 7 file, even if I no longer use GM 7. If Mark was allowed to illegalize inspecting the format, then I would no longer be able to access my game! He would effectively be stealing other people's work.

It's my work, and I must be able to decide how to use my work. If I want to make a tool to automate the process of converting a GM game to Python (which I'm doing manually right now, BTW), then nobody can stop me from doing that. What Mark Overmars is saying sounds to me like an attempt to own the users of GM, using a lock-in strategy. The Microsoft kind of business, the RIAA kind of complaining.

Just think about how Microsoft would have messed themselves if they decided to forbid OpenOffice developers from inspecting the doc format!

This kind of licensing is one of the many reasons why I have moved on to Free Software (free as in freedom, that is).

[IsmAvatar]

Actually, if you read the license agreement of GM6, you will see that the exe, whilst still your property, is not permitted to be modified, tampered with, decompiled, etc. Thus, he's basically just extending this policy to gm6's whilst retaining a wording that allows the user to modify the binaries with GM. This is nothing new - many many programs use this kind of tricky wording in their license agreement to ward off hacking.

Also, welcome to the Free community. You may find me to be a particularly interesting specimen, as I like to go a step further than Free and make things Open Source. In fact, just about a week ago I made $50 off an open source project. In fact, at one time I even tried a little Open Credit (I did not claim credit for my code, and anyone could claim credit for it) just for thrills.

I hope to see you active with LGM, our current big open source project. The source code for version 1.5 is available to download, but if you would like to join the official LGM team, grab yourself a copy of Eclipse with the Subclipse plugin and we'll add you to the SVN. We need more people to help with it, as progress is currently very slow (it's kinda a 1 man team, what with TGMG taking exams and refocusing G-Java in a new direction, and Clam still trying to get internet working, and me obsessing over getting 1 little thing to work exactly right at a time). What do you consider yourself an expert of? Perhaps I can assign you to your own section. I'm obviously the pro of file formats and efficiency, clam decided to beat me to the punch and coded the file format stuff for me already, but also started on the MDI on the side. TGMG just goes around breaking things (hahaha).

[Quadduc]

Eclipse came with my distro, and Subclipse is installed so that's OK. I've done some Python in Eclipse, and I think it's a great IDE. I haven't used Subclipse before, but I'm familiar with SVN.

I'm not sure what I'm best at, but I'm interested in cryptography (I won the GM DB Cracking challenge at the GMC some years ago), and (I think) I like solving problems/bugs (unless I can't fix it by the end of the day - this has the effect of making my days usually a bit longer than 24 hours). I can't promise anything about my activity, but this project being free/open source, and my fury over certain methods used in the coming version of GM, should only be a plus to my motivation.

PS: I haven't got Java 1.6 installed yet, I'm currently using version 1.5.

[clam]

As I said, I've got eclipse running of my flash drive, so I can use it at school (where I have net access), but SVN doesn't seem to have a proxy option (which I need!).

[IsmAvatar]

Quadduc: You will need Java 6. The Tree Drag and Drop that I use was introduced in Java 6 (finally). You can download it from java.sun.com
I can't say there's much of a call fo cryptography here, unless you want to go break the license agreement and crack GM's encryption or the encryption/compression he's been using on Extension Packages. We can tell you that it seems GM uses Crypt32 (even Wine hasn't gotten very far with this encryption), and it is programmed into GM itself, rather than making an external call to the computer's built in Crypt32 dll. Aside from that, to help with LGM, you should probably familiarize yourself with LayoutManagers if you haven't already. Right now we're at the point where we're adding in the different resource editor windows. Or you could just look around to see what needs programming and do little odd jobs here and there like TGMG does.

clam: Well that sucks. Maybe you can manually download the updates? Idunno. I wish SVN would get its act together.
If you want, I could just upload a jar of the latest source code for you from time to time.


Anyways, we should probably discuss this in a more appropriate topic, rather than flooding the License Agreement topic with LGM stuff

[gmguru]

clam - Try netbeans, it has a proxy option, and if you choose netbeans 6 (highly recommended) it will have great svn support, without installing a module.

Also netbeans gets rid of that accept temporary/permenantly thing which I HATED in eclipse! You should find netbeans 6 just as good as eclipse

[clam]

Could you point out which part of the GM7 License agreement actually says we can't create software that reads gmk files. I'm having trouble finding anything that says it specifically. There is this:

3.3. Neither you nor any third party may modify, adapt, decompile or reverse engineer the Games.

but it doesn't really specify that it means editables - I mean it's not actually a game until it's an executable - you can't play it otherwise. How is it a "game" if you can't "play" it? Am I being pedantic, or could we get away with this? Of course, we'd still have to decrypt it.

[IsmAvatar]

Possibly 1.2.j

1.2. You must not:

j. create data or executable programs which mimic data or functionality in the Software;

The section you pulled out means executable games, not editable games. Otherwise, you wouldn't even be allowed to use the Software to modify the Games

Am I being pedantic, or could we get away with this? Of course, we'd still have to decrypt it.

There's no doubt in my mind that one could easily get away with it, provided they get past the encryption.

[clam]

The section you pulled out means executable games, not editable games. Otherwise, you wouldn't even be allowed to use the Software to modify the Games

Well that would certainly stop us!

j. create data or executable programs which mimic data or functionality in the Software;

So technically we could do the above as long as we didn't install gm7 on our computer!!! (prove that I did - I'd like to see you try) We'd have to use our psychic powers to figure out the encryption though (hehe)

edit: It also doesn't say anything about anyone else using the above kind of software (that we happened to stumble upon after hiring thousands of monkeys to type random letters into Eclipse for a thousand years)

[IsmAvatar]

It's open source... nobody in particular created it, so nobody gets in trouble for it. There also appears to be nothing against tampering with the binaries of the gmk files themselves - aside from the encryption (and any license involved with crypt32). Plus, they can never prevent us from documenting the binaries or explaining how things work, as that's protected under free speech, so long as it's used "for educational purposes only" (much like that of Song Lyrics)

That's why, when someone says they're going to try and crack the encryption, I give them a nice pat on the back, tell them what they need to know, and say "good luck", rather than my usual route of "it's against the license agreement and you'll find it impossible, forget about it".