I can get behind that idea. For the front page.
However, I don’t want to rule out hosting incomplete extensions, or even broken ones. The big problem with the current ecosystem is that you can’t find stuff without looking in three different places! “Put all the extensions in one place” is at the top of my requirements list. If it’s got a big red X on it and a label “doesn’t work”, fine – you’re already way ahead by knowing that the extensions exists and who to ask about fixing it.
The recent thread about Disambiguation Control is informative. Mike Gentry came in saying “help, I want to control disambiguation somehow.” The discussion wound up with mattw pointing at his DC extension and then updating it for 6M62.
Ideally, the extensions site could lead Mike in this direction even though the DC extension was not 6M62-compatible. That’s why I said “…for the front page”. If you search on “Disambiguation”, you kinda want to know about the available options even if some of them are out of date.
Maybe search results could be divided into two sections. First you’d see the extensions that are compatible with the latest build of Inform. Under those, there could be a heading saying something like “The following extensions are not compatible with the current build of Inform” and then list the older extensions that match the search terms.
Greetings from spanish multiverse! I am following with very interest the development of this new tool for I7.
Question: Can I collaborate uploading Spanish extensions? Basically there are three types:
*Spanish Language, extension which allows the parser to understand Spanish,
*Original Spanish extensions,
*Translations to Spanish of english extensions
The current status of the Spanish stuff is that the Spanish Language is updated to I7 6M62, along with a couple of other extensions. They are available through Github.
In order to not contribute to a cofusion maybe it should be necessary create tags #Translation #Spanish.
Please, let me know any opinion.
Thanxs and good initiative!
Sarganar.
I’d also like to point out that I find the use of “CC non-commercial” is often misguided; I encounter it again and again in IF stories. That means if someone is using advertisement on the website that hosts screen shots or excerpts of an IF story - they have to rely on “copyright fair use”, as it’s almost impossible these days to not say something has commercial ties. Many websites and blogs have advertising. Same goes for selling or featuring images on Amazon app store, Apple iTunes, Google Play store, etc. All these are, even when the app is free, commercial profit-making services given that promoting your story and it’s content on their store is an act of business, commerce. “non-commercial” is extremely restrictive, and the term “freeware” has little formal meaning. In practice, GPL has been less-restrictive, as it does NOT prohibit use like this on commercial services (iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, etc).
Most people don’t actually want to change or alter the code of your extension that they wouldn’t share back to the community (GPL requirement). But to make them hostile to any commercial use of any kind is very restrictive. If an author were to become famous and be interviewed on commercial television (CNN / The Today Show) - that would be restricted. Again, “fair use copyright” would overcome that, but really - why do so many here seem to think CC-non-commercial is a sensible license?
Does anyone here think CC-non-commercial is a sensible license for extensions? Nearly all of them are CC-attribution, and the exceptions I recall are GPL.
I don’t understand why people think it’s sensible for any Interactive Fiction that I’ve seen it used on. Can you imagine printing a book in 1950 that says “pages of this book can not be quoted by businesses, including book stores and paid magazine reviewers - and our artwork image on the cover can’t be put in your store front window” without permission. For a book that’s distributed free, no-cost? You can’t upload a .z8 file to Google Drive, Amazon ECS, or DropBox, file sharing, to share it for free - as they are all commercial services. IFDB doesn’t seem to even distinguish the variations of the CC (commercial / non-commercial) - so I thought it was worth mentioning anytime I see CC come up - as I have found tons of use of it here. If you email a .z8 file to your friend over Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo - you broke the license (you are distributing, it’s an act of copy, copyright)! For a free story. For clarity: I think part of the problem is authors think the license makes sense for their source code, but are putting it on the run-time, compiled story - the printed book itself. From what I’ve seen, most IF stories never even get their source code released. And further, most players don’t bother to mind such details anyway, so it’s not a topic I’ve seen get much, if any, discussion.
Ok, so I’m still thinking about this statement:
If I understand things, i7x extensions are only available as source code. There is no binary format for a ‘compiled’ i7x extension, like .i7binary right? So how can you possibly violate the GPL license if you are distributing a self contained .i7x text file that is the extension? It’s like distributing a .c source code file on a website, it is a fully self-contained source file, which is the significant requirement of the GPL. Now, for an author to use a GPL extension in a story, it gets messy - because ultimately the Inform compiler is going to make unified .ulx binary for Glulx (possibly mixing GPL and unreleased inform 7 source code) - but I don’t see distributing the .7x (source code) extensions themselves as an issue.
Anyone that used the GPL for their extension is treading thin ice if you ask me. We should just leave those out of the library. If they choose to change the license, great. Otherwise, just move on without it.
Maybe put together a page of suggestions for authors on these topics: recommended licensing and the reasons they are recommended, based on history and experience.
The impression I get from §27.1 in the Inform documentation is that, if you submit an extension to the public library, you don’t have a choice about the license:
(I don’t exactly have a point to make about this, but it seemed like potentially useful information.)
Slow down. You’re jumping between claims about Inform extensions and IF game files, and you’re also apparently confused about what the CC-NC license means.
Quite a lot of IF games, especially older ones, say something like “do not distribute for money”. I don’t think very many use the CC-NC license itself, however. And I don’t remember any extensions that do.
That’s correct. This was a policy decision – Inform extensions are (IMHO) most useful if they’re licensed CC-BY, and the public library is easiest to understand if everything in it has the same license.
As I said, I’d like the new extensions site to contain all extensions. I’d also like it to become the new Public Library someday, so that’s a possible future conflict to sort out. (But we don’t have to sort it out right now!)
By the way, I will re-mention I can help with dev support. Whatever list of changes are needed, I can pitch in. Hosting too if it’s needed (on plover).
I imagine any non-controversial issues that Dannii has marked “enhancement” on Github would be ok to work on, e.g. having both “view source” and “download” buttons for extensions.
Possibly CC4-Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which allows modification and distribution, even for commercial projects internationally. (CC3 is specifically US I think).
This post brought up some questions for me.
I’d be happy to add Daniel Stelzer’s extension to the new extensions site, however:
How do I confirm that it has the proper license? As far as I know it’s only on Github, not in the public library. Do I need to get permission from the author to add it?
Also, I’m still not totally sure what the implications are of tagging it with an Inform version. I’m still wondering about the answer to this question:
Do I need to test it myself to verify that it works? Do I need to ask the author whether it’s going to be supported?
I release all my code as CC-BY, though I haven’t actually specified that anywhere; I should add it to the Github.
I’ve been falling behind on my extension maintenance though. I try to keep the code updated to the latest Inform and all, but often don’t have the time unless people bring up specific issues. (Some of which are still taking a long time to fix.)
We should get it all onto the new extensions site so people can help you with it! (Or if you want to post help wanted requests on Github, however that works, I could take a look at some things.)
Something related but maybe not; what’s the naming convention when someone takes over maintenance of an old extension? I just got snarled over not realizing that Inline Hyperlinks by Daniel Stelzer was the updated version of Inline Hyperlinks by Erik Temple; what convention should we use there?
According to WI §27.4-5,
That’s the convention I’ve been trying to follow. But when people are making maintenance updates it gets a bit messy, because ownership can transfer back and forth a lot (as happened with Inline Hyperlinks).
OK, I’ve added your extension to the site. I had to add a date to the version number, so I used the date of your Github commit. (I didn’t mark any Inform builds though, since I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work.)