Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
that's an odd and extremely unhelpful (and IMO, untrue) statement
its more like people here wish they could help but can't because they don't use macOS
Important. Please read.
The GPL license, included with the OpenGL "aali.dll" source code, should be seen for what it is: A nasty, spiteful, little document that goes well beyond ensuring fair play and encouraging collaboration within open projects and, instead, encourages draconian laws and punishments, while giving the jobsworth types a jackboot to wear.
Any document as long as that "license" should be seen for the snake it is - It also gives very vindictive people a weapon to use in order to force programmers into releasing all their hard work to the public - whether they want to or not. This has already been attempted in regards to The Reunion.
A member of Qhimm.com, quantumpencil threatened legal action if 2 external calls to Aali.dll from ddraw.dll were not removed. If this wasn't done, he demanded that my own code source (ddraw.dll - written entirely in Borland Delphi) be turned over. GPL was used as a political football to get at my own hard work, which is a completely separate executable and entity to aali.dll. The moderators of Qhimm.com felt they couldn't take the risk that this lunatic was being serious and so forced The Reunion mod offline until the "offending" code was removed and the full source for aali.dll be made public (something I've never been against - since it's 95% other people's work). Indeed, the fork that quantumpencil uses is based on a build of Aali's Opengl DLL by Luksy, with fixes by myself and Maki. I supplied this to quantumpencil openly and he and True Odin agreed to help improve the code and work with The Reunion. Within a week, they had reneged on this agreement and created their own fork. We now have more confusion and division than ever. There is no legal precedent that a closed source program that calls external functions from an open source program must also be open source. The fact that the GPL community is openly debating it should tell you something.
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse490t/11sp/docs/DerivativeWorksGPL.pdf
chapter 3.4
In short, the debate over static and dynamic linking simply misses the mark. As we shall see in our next example, using inter-module communication as the basis for a derivative work analysis will lead frequently to counter-intuitive and nonsensical results.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1394623/can-i-dynamically-call-a-lgpl-gpl-software-in-my-closed-source-application
it is not clear whether an executable that dynamically links to a GPL code should be considered a derivative work (see Weak Copyleft). The free/open-source software community is split on this issue.
Unfortunately,
the vindictive person in question got his way after a kangaroo court trial on Qhimm's Discord channel, and so I've now removed the 2 completely legal function calls and supplied the full source for aali.dll. It's almost entirely useless to anyone other than myself and a much better fork (ffxn - based on the build I supplied to quantumpencil and True Odin) is in progress. I'll be modifying that code, in time, to merge it with The Reunion.\line\line I always acknowledge people's contributions. I work tirelessly for the modding community as a whole and want to see FF7 realize its true potential. I just wish others were like minded. The FF7 modding community has never had a proper leader or one project to get behind. I tried to get that going with True Odin and quantumpencil but, sadly, ego and wanting to pursue their own totally separate projects got in the way (in my view). What we now have is
1. 7th heaven - a convoluted approach to modding that tries to be one-size-fits-all but creates chaos. It adds a lot of bells and whistles for very little practical gain and doesn't seek to fix the massive number of bugs that still exist. In fact, it just adds more.
2. ffxn - an updated version of Aali's DLL forked from a build by Luksy. It too adds way too many bells and whistles and, again, largely doesn't fix the bugs that need fixing. Because True Odin didn't work with me, it's also reinventing the wheel with things that are already implemented in The Reunion. Despite this, it has fixed a lot of problems with Aali's original code, and it will certainly be a welcome addition to The Reunion when I modify it for that use.
3. Sister Ray by quantumpencil - One man's vanity project that will likely crash and burn long-term because he didn't listen to Jeff Goldblum in Jurrasic Park.
I'll finish by saying the FF7 community often cuts its own throat by not addressing bugs with the original engine or the 1998 port and by not looking at the problems that require a lot more urgency than silly gimmicks that 0.1% of modders and users will find worthwhile. Even with the tools already available, an extreme minority of fan-made projects ever reach the half way stage. The Reunion is entirely focused on resolving bugs and issues in the original game, however small - and creating a framework that modders from all countries can use to bring an updated FF7 to life under one executable and solution. It's not my ego project. And I am not being selfish by keeping ddraw.dll closed source until I retire. I am doing it precisely because all a new fork does to this community is divide it further. It's also the case that you need to trust that your source code will be respected by others, and I don't have any confidence it will be, especially given what's already happened.
We need to stop pissing about and start working on a project that has an achievable long-term aim: to unify modding efforts - to fix problems that have been there since 1998. We need to do that before adding expansions or time consuming - often game breaking - gimmicks.
And that's why The Reunion exists.
Daniel L.P. Burke
