I used to work at Rovio (the creator of Angry Birds). Everyone was telling the story of a talk given by Peter Vesterbacka, the head of marketing. When it was time for questions, a man from the audience asked what physics engine the game uses. Vesterbacka gives the correct answer, Box2D, to which the person replied with another question. "Why isn't it mentioned in the credits? And by the way, I'm Erin Catto, the creator of Box2D." To this Vesterbacka replied "Come talk to me after the show". Maybe that's when Erin was given the hoodie? Also, his name was soon added to the credits.
But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!
To the larger point, do you know if Rovio did support/pay Eric in any other way than that hoodie?
Angry Birds generated $500M [0], supposedly.
I would also not be surprised if the Rovio developers, designers, testers, etc. who worked on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie - I actually assume they didn't.
But still, you know. Dare I say it - what about "fairness"? :-)
I find it odd how we frame fairness in regards to open source software. He licensed his software as MIT. It says anyone can you use it without owing the author anything. So how is it unfair?
To be clear, I think that open source maintainers deserve much more, but I don't understand why we rarely inspect the licenses as the source of the problem.
He got his name in the credits. The question was if he is owed anything else. The contract he created says he was not. I’m simply suggesting he might need a different contract.
If the comment above is correct, he was only added to the credits after he had to ask for it after the fact.
So the ONLY thing the license asked for is to be named and that was supposedly violated. So a multi million dollar company can just violate a generous license and then after a fact cling to this exact license while arguing to not pay a single cent more than the license asked for. Alright...
But you probably depend on over 500 open source libraries and tools, mostly ones you're not aware of. (Do you ever use a linux VM to run or just develop your stuff? Ever use git or curl etc? Did you know that tools and components in turn use other open-source libraries that you didn't pay for?) The main reason you use such things is so that you don't have to worry about this question.
I find it baffling in the other direction. The whole point of licensing is to ensure you’re a decent person.
If you’re creating something new and you dare try to copy anything without a license, the pushback is unanimous and universal: everyone agrees you’re a bad person for even thinking of it.
This is the same argument in the opposite direction. By fulfilling the terms of a license, you’re ensuring you play by the rules. In fact, licenses are the only real protection that open source maintainers have.
So why diss on someone for following the license terms? This whole moralizing and tut-tutting is a weird branch of the convo.
Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).
That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.
Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.
The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.
I don’t think this is about fairness so much as a wish that developers would look out for their own self interest just a tiny bit.
We all get the full-court open source brainwashing during our early years of learning about programming, so it’s hard to ever step back and look at creating something from any other lens than “I should release this as open source”.
That’s the default, and anything less might get you grumped at by “the community”, so it’s the safest option.
But if your thing can be picked up by a megacorp and used as the basis for their $100M product, it might be in your best interest to carve yourself out a little clause that lets you capture some of that.
Because there’s a clear mismatch between the value generated from Box2d vs the value the creator receives, and that’s common for open-source in general.
It would be common decency to donate even a small portion of that $500 million, even if the license technically doesn’t require it.
MIT is simple, open, and common which is a big benefit for indie projects, small studios, and anyone with limited legal resources.
It means there’s lots of info on the internet explaining how to use the license and they can be relatively certain they won’t accidentally fall into some legal trap or misinterpret the license. It also means there’s legal precedent around the license.
All that to say, custom licenses are actually a big issue for small players.
You seem to be confusing what is legally/contractually required with what is fair. Fairness, in general, isn't defined by law or contracts, although some laws try to codify it.
> I would also not be surprised if the [staff] on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie
That's almost certainly the case, yes. Anything like royalties / residuals is pretty much unheard of in gamedev. You do the work, you do the crunch, you don't talk about conditions, you don't talk about pay, you are actively hostile towards the 'U' word, your boss _________ ____ __ _____.
For your service, you get the chance to be in the credits, provided your service continues after going "gold"[0], of course. Then you get laid off which is actually a win because you get to leave the company without getting blacklisted. Please forgive the gentle hyperbole, it's illustrative.
The situation may have improved (slightly)[1] with ~actors as SAG-AFTRA was a growing influence in the industry some years ago. I'm a bit out of the loop on that side of things, though.
[0] not that anyone ships after going gold anymore
[1] improved slightly relative to "I'm the voice of Niko Bellic and I got paid in Famista cassettes" -- no this is not a true story, I'm actually not even a voice actor.
But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!