GPL, does it work for you.

[bomber]

The GPL licence sounds like the ideal for any project that relies on community involvement. Yet after reading the comments of a prominent content developer questions have to be asked if using it is more trouble than it's worth.

It seems its not a perfect fit, for the type of work and control of it that many content developers ultimately need.

Lets look at some of the issues...

Q1) it's my plane
A1) After spending thousands of hours on it, you'd certainly think is was but having distributed it with a GPL licence it now belongs to everyone whose downloaded it, so much so it's theirs to sell.

Q2) Why is my plane not mine to control ?
A2) The files you have on your hard-drive or repository are yours to control, just as equally the files of another persons are theirs to control, be it on a hard-drive or repository.

Q3) Isn't there a gentleman's agreement that I control the planes development in FG, like the core developers told me ?
A3) FGAddon access is controlled by the core developers and here again they own a copy of your work just like in Q2, it's not yours. If you have access this can be removed at the click of a finger.

Q4) I've spent thousands of hours on developing my plane, yet now I'm getting grief for errors from other copies that I have no control over
A4) Outsiders have little knowledge of the effort and the variety of disciplines that you personally have to master or pull together from others to make a whole plane. And as planes get more and more accurate in both 3d/2d/fdm and systems, this is only increasing. The GPL licence you used has opened a pandoras box of your work in which amateurs with all the best intentions to improve on your work will give you grief and damage your reputation for years to come.

Allowing others to copy, work on and distribute your work is admirable, but does the GPL licence work for you... Many external flight sim moders with far more years of experience look at and think ....NO THANKS.

[Octal450]

10000000000% Agree. Fantastic Post and Fantastic Points.

Kind Regards,
Josh

[bomber]

I get it Josh, but don't you want to be a force for change ?

[hans05]

Just to chip in a different view point (mine):

I really like GPL and alike licenses.
For people who do not want FG core developers to gain control over their aircraft, just piss off some core developer (VERY easy task) and leave doubts about whether or not everything in your project is GPL. It seems more difficult to get into the FGaddon than to stay out of it.
Problem solved.

Two famous examples where this works:

1) Octal himself --> people get the planes from github and not from FGaddon. I just do not get that (as stated by them) they WANT to get into the FGaddon.
2) FGUK --> None of their planes are in FGaddon and all of them are still (after many years) under their control.

So I personally do not really see the problem.....
Maybe I am missing something.

[bomber]

Interesting logic..... Distance oneself from the FG community.

[Octal450]

Hi Simon,
Well, to be honest, I'd love to be a force for change. Here is why that sadly could not happen by me at this time.

1) Since I graduated high school, I have been running a repair business and it has been going well. This leaves me with MUCH less time for FG, so when I do get time off, I tend to just fire up Prepar3D and VATSIM and fly there. It started to become a hassle to develop, and I wasn't enjoying it anymore (except for flight control systems and autopilots, that stuff I always enjoy and don't intend to totally stop working with)
2) My forced hand. Because the 3D, and such in my projects in GPL, I was forced into using GPL. Now of course, I was planning to split the repo, but I really began to stop caring at this point. Perhaps if I still cared about developing and all that, I woulda split the repos as I planned and continued my work in proprietary, and let the 3D and stuff remain GPL. I really, really, really, do not like the idea of someone just taking my hard work for themselves. Sounds like we just share everything and nobody really owns anything (what political ideology does that remind you of???)

I do believe some day, someone will create a change. But I don't think I am that person.

Hi hans,
I don't really know you since I chose not to follow the whole drama that unfolded, but regardless:
1) Well, no, they get them from MY github. If they get them from somewhere else and then ask me for support, I promptly tell them to go away. As I said if I had it my way, I'd never licensed the damn thing in GPL at all. I wrote most of the code in that plane, the rest was written by my dear friend legoboyvdlp. So it is our code 100%.
2) No idea about FGUK or what they do - so I won't comment.

Kind Regards,
Josh

[bomber]

Josh,

Sounds like we have more in common than one might think..

1) The totally varied skills required is what eventually drags you down, as you never get to master any one discipline well enough to be able to truly enjoy it. You might spend a month on xml flight modelling the next month on updating 3d, followed by it's 2d work, then one goes back to picking up the xml work and it seems that everything one knew before has been forgotten and need dragging out the corners of the mind. If only you'd not had to do the 3d and 2d work ones xml productivity would be through the roof as opposed to it being a snail pace..

This is a major gripe I have with Thorstens flightgear way of "if you want it, do it yourself"..

I mean I've seen people struggling with jsbsim and thought, you know what f. em., I could solve that problem in 5 minutes as it's very similar to a problem I've already solved, just needs a bit of adapting. But as they've made it quite clear they don't like me and wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire, I'll just let em struggle for the next 6 months.

5 mins of my time vs 6 months of theirs..... what's to not like about the FG ethos. !

The same occurs where you have plane oriented teams, "oh no we don't work on combat planes, it's against our anti-war stance". So a group doing tail draggers won't come to the aid of commercial airliner enthusiasts... etc

It's why I've called for teams to be set up along disciplines rather than planes.

But the ethos 'You can't tell me what I've got to do in my hobby" is used to ruin the setting up and these, and people cheer and clap the "Go Flightgear, Go Flightgear" as it's happening.

imagine a team of dedicated flight modelers, they'd be knocking a flight model a week out. 52 planes a year all done to a standardized design.

2) Animal farm.

[Octal450]

Hi Simon,
Yeah.

1) Yeah, you are right here. I experienced this myself. In the IDG project I'd jump from cockpit setup, to Canvas displays, to FlyByWire FCS, to Autopilots, to Hydraulic systems, to Electrical, all over the place. Well it worked - but only because I was working on 1-2 planes at a time. The problem here is I'm not sure how many people want to go modelling every hydraulic system of every plane, for example. But I can give you an example of where this worked. In early 2019 or maybe it was mid/late 2018, don't remember, I spent a few months banging out Autopilot/FCS after Autopilot/FCS for the OPRF guys. F-15, Mirage-2000 (with a totally new FlyByWire in YAsim - how I got that working, no clue), Viggen, helping the MiG with Pinto, f16, then I went back and did F-15 FCS brand new (even tho part of it was thrown away by Richard), F-14 FCS (not even finished), Mirage-2000 JSBsim FlyByWire, and then Viggen hydromech system, then new autopilots for F-15, f16, and Viggen again. And it worked. To the point where I've become "Autopilot guy" in FG. Its the first thing I ever did in FG, and now apparently will be the last as well. So that is a perfect example of how your theory can work.

At IDG, I made the idea to create the most realistic simulation possible. We did not specify what that meant. We had commercial airliners, and a GA plane, and even dabbled with the idea of doing a fighter. It wasn't one type of aircraft, but yet the idea of how these plane should represented. And the result was people being pissed off that they code was "not up to standard" and also "being exclusive". Well of course, I had to play gatekeeper to prevent any code from getting in that was not up to the standard we needed. I was called "violating the GPL" (???????) and a "terrible project leader" and such. Had we had gone proprietary this wouldn't have been an issue. I've found most GPL projects end up being messy or buggy so it seems this is a common results of these open source anybody contribute GPL style licenses.

Kind Regards,
Josh

[bomber]

What winds me up is when one looks at some existing work... a placeholder of an external 3d which in my experience as a professional 3d engineer has had about half a weekend spent on it, about 8 hours. It's got a cockpit from another plane, and a rudimentary flight model, which is possibly also a copy of a similar planes. and I estimate it'll take about a thousand hours to get it's flight model and systems code authentic enough to want to put my name on it.

This placeholder took 1/125th of the time and effort that I'll put in, I'll never be considered as being the owner of the plane, and files I create will need this placeholder or FGAddon gate keepers permission to be included simply because someone else did a quick and dirty copy and paste of an existing plane added a rough external 3d model and changed a few file names.

I understand the principles behind GPL, but does it genuinely work for content that's worked on by many different people doing many different disciplines.

At the end of the day what we all want is for ourselves and others to fly the best possible plane

So is GPL an enabler or a hindrance ?

Simon

[IAHM-COL]

This is an interesting topic.
From my (the user) perspective; GPL is largely advantageous over any other license (free or non free) that I know of.
Best,
IH