Specific Proposal for Resolution (Was: playdiplomacy.com is phpDiplomacy)

Email gets lost and unnecessary emotion often gets read into text.
Accusations that one person broke off email contact with another are
inherently unfounded unless all parties consistently request, return
and retain read receipts.

Jan and/or Kestas may have a case against FYB... but they may not. They
should contact the Electronic Frontiers Foundation together with an
inquiry. The standard GPL does not cover right of performance so
there is a loophole for programs in interpreted languages that are used
over the Internet, such as games written in PHP. That's why the game
"Legend of the Green Dragon" changed to a Creative Commons License. The
Affero GPL seems to have closed this loop hole, but I think that dual
licensing the source under the BSD may have left it open... hence my
recommendation that you solicit legal council in the form of contacting
the EFF.

The flame war has to stop. The principles should agree on wording for a
joint post to request an end to negative publicity on this topic. They
should then prominently post that notice to both sites (and Facebook,
if it's been involved) and actively work to clean up discussions on
their respective bulletin boards.

Jan should open the source code for playdiplomacy.com, whether or not
such is legally required, and make sure that requested attributions are
posted prominently. Kestas should look at merging any legitimate FYB
contibutions back into the main trunk. All those deploying the platform
should have prominent links to other Diplomacy sites and/or a third
party listing of sites deploying variations of the platform. All future
work should be careful of the PHP loophole to open source licenses.

All administrators of Diplomacy hobby sites should bill the operating
cost of their servers and value added services (if any) as the basis of
soliciting donations rather than recouping development costs. The
development or purchase of a site is done purely on a speculative
basis, paying site owners back for this doesn't do anything for the
hobby. It encourages speculators at the expense of operators.

Kestas and Jan are both victims. If they can work out their differences
(however much or little they employ my suggestions above) then they both
deserve as much support and sympathy as they can willingly tolerate. As
a community, let's give it to them.

Chris


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