openmw.org

Great. I suspected it was probably always like this but after installing five thousand versions of OpenMW, I stopped caring about that after the first thousand.

1) We'll likely want to change that in the future (but not now). We should be proud of what we built under the GPL.

The problem is that the license field in the NSIS installer is only designed for showing end-user license agreements that you're required to accept to install the software, which doesn't fit with the GPL which is an open-source license.

GPL has user-rights as well... the end user has a right to see the source code of this application. In the text should also be a link to where to find it.

Yeah, you're definitely supposed to agree to the GPL before using software covered by it. Otherwise, you might not realise that you're not allowed to give the installer to someone else without making sure they have the ability to access the source code.

I actually looked this up back when I started doing the NSIS packages (After a comment / complaint by a user), and while you're required to provide the GPL to the user to inform them of their rights (like how we do as a LICENSE file in the installation directory), you're at the same time expected to let the user use your software without requiring them to agree to abide by the GPL - as it has no legal requirements for them as a user of the software.

So if our installer is to show the GPL, then it can't be in a license page that requires the user to accept the GPL before they're allowed to install the software, rather it should be in a license page that simply informs the user of their provided rights under the GPL.

And we're not allowed to 'go with the flow' of all the other pieces of GPL software which display it and make you agree with it to proceed?

Can't we modify the installer to not use the word 'agree' but just 'next' or something similar? Maybe a bit of header text: OpenMW is developed and shipped under the GPLv3 license. Here it is for your convenience and a link to the source.

Just rename the button to "Ok" (or "Next" as @psi29a pointed out), rather than "Accept"/"Agree"?

The startup notice

For interactive programs, it is usually a good idea to make the program display a brief notice about copyright and copying permission when it starts up. See the end of the GNU GPL for more information about this. [1]

... To do so, attach the following notices to the program. ...

Code: Select all

    <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
    Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

[2].

The NSIS installer is not really configurable enough to modify the setup pages themselves, we'd probably have to switch to wix to be able to do more customization in our CMakeList.
At the moment, if you want to do anything more than the default installer then it requires modifying CMake itself and writing new NSIS installer scripts, which I'd prefer to not do. (I did so earlier to remove the license page entirely, but updates keep messing that up)