Let me amend my previous response.
On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 11:50 PM Anthony J. Bentley <anth...@anjbe.name> wrote:
> Nam Nguyen writes:
> > Because the license is so vaguely defined, it will be safer to only
> > package nxengine-evo and to not distribute Cave Story. nxengine-evo
> > upstream clarified that assets in ${WRKSRC}/data are released under
> > GPLv3. (https://github.com/nxengine/nxengine-evo/issues/169)
>
> Upstream is wrong. These data files are straight from Cave Story, which
> is released under a freeware license that does not grant explicit
> permission to modify or redistribute.
Actually, the Cave Story data files are extracted directly from a Cave
Story download, so that's okay, with caveats (see below). Those files
are not stored in ${WRKSRC}/data. So what is stored there?
nxengine-evo is a fork of nxengine. nxengine is a vanilla Cave Story
reimplementation that only requires the original Cave Story data
files. On the other hand, nxengine-evo adds graphical niceties like
widescreen backgrounds, animated avatars, and a few other things.
These are inspired by, but not copied from, similar graphical
improvements in the *commercial* (non-freeware) versions of Cave
Story. However, even though they're not directly copied from
commercial Cave Story, they're directly modified from freeware Cave
Story, and freeware Cave Story provides no permission to modify. So
once again, nxengine-evo is not packageable due to its license.
What would be packageable? The original nxengine, which is GPLv3, does
not contain these improperly licensed graphical additions, and only
needs data files at runtime, not build/install time.
I mentioned a caveat above. Both nxengine and nxengine-evo extract the
Cave Story data files at runtime from Cave Story itself. This would be
okay, I believe... but the version of Cave Story required is an
English-patched version redistributed by a fansite. I don't think we
should import a port that requires an unauthorized fan-repackaging of
a freeware game to run. If nxengine's data extraction code were
modified to pull the data from the original freeware sources (the
original Japanese Cave Story and the original English translation
patch) rather than an unauthorized fan conglomeration, that would
probably be as good as we can get it.
