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Who owns Xcom: Colonisation?


Darth_Thanatos

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I've been reading the whole site, and I got attracted towards this particular project. As it seemed interesting and you had something to show (i.e. install and play), I went to your Codeplex project site to see what additional info was there and to downloand whatever you had there.

 

So, imagine my surprise when I click on the link to download the software and get confronted with this:

 

To download the file you must agree to the following license:

 

[...]

 

2. Grant of Rights

(A) Copyright Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, Microsoft grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce the software, prepare derivative works of the software and distribute the software or any derivative works that you create.

 

(B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, Microsoft grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under licensed patents to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the software or derivative works of the software.

 

[...]

 

I am no lawyer, but if I were you I'd start checking any EULA you might have clicked "I agree" for being allowed to host your software in Codeplex. I read the whole download agreement, and in no place gets mentioned the creator or creators (i.e. you, by name or collective)) of the software (in this case, Xcom: colonisation), just "Microsoft authorizes this" and "Microsoft grants that". Or are you all working for Microsoft?

 

When you deem the game is finished, will you be able to publish it, say, under GPL if you want? Or are you chained to Microsoft license?

 

(dramatically)Are we going to see "Xcom: Colonisation" under another name and the Microsoft logo?

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Well spotted we discussed this amongst ourselves when we first switched over to codeplex.

 

Luckily we have nothing for them to take off us right now anyway so its not a big problem but it really isn't anyway...

 

Basically what it means is that we have a license to develop, share and even sell whatever we want as long as it doesn't infringe on any other copyrights etc. and so on...

 

The BUT is that we aren't exclusive owners of anythig we make so although we could finish the game and sell it for personal gain, so could pretty much anyone else in the world.

 

As it is, we can basically cannibalise other people's work and projects from Codeplex to further our own progress. They can do exactly the same with our work should they wish to but we have no real problem with that as the only files stored there really are mostly code.

 

That's basically the legal jist of it! Until we have a much more substantial piece of software then noone will want it anyway and if it gets to that point we can always move somewhere exclusive or even to a private domain.

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