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Re: Um...
Posted By: JorgeDate: 4/23/05 10:12 a.m.

In Response To: Re: Um... (Bob-B-Q)

: Legal issues and/or complaints from whoever made the scenarios, maybe?

Rumour control is sorely needed here.

On the marathon developer list, the issue was brought up that the EXE inside the installer had been modified from the original source, yet that source was not available, hence in violation of the GPL license. Claude pullled the installers. Here is the original thread on the marathon-devel web archive so you can read it for yourselves.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7063637&forum_id=5229

I (Jorge) am the creator of the installers and here is the response I have sent out to an e-mail which I got regarding this issue, stating what my part in this whole thing is.

--BEGIN QUOTED EMAIL--

Greetings,

I am afraid I don't check the devel list much anymore (I'm certainly not subscribed anymore), and I haven't lurked in the usual Marathon sites much since I uploaded the installers to Claude, so my apologies if I missed the entire issue.

Let me try to explain what it is that I have done, and offer up any information that I have. It goes without saying that Claude was generous to accept these installers from me because I go way back with the Marathon community and he remembers me from the days of #marathon and #bungie on EFNet in the mid to late 90's. If anything was misinterpreted or miscommunicated, or any t's were not crossed, I bear the full responsibility and public shame and humiliation that would ensue, and not Claude. He was simply bowing to my wishes to have these made available.

Let's begin. I am not a programmer, I have never been involved in the Aleph project, and have never even downloaded the source to any of my macs or windows machines. So therefore, stating that my one-click installers are based on modified source is quite ludicrous, unless the source was modified before I got the binary in my hands. Let's take a look at this then.

I am almost 100% certain the binary which is the version that I used to create the installers is this one (read on why I am not 100% certain):

Windows Aleph One SDL 2003-02-09 - AlephOne-Windows-20030209.zip
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=157671

Here is the page for the information and source for this version:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=157676
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1997&package_id=82132&release_id=157671

This source was never downloaded by me, nor was this source compiled by me. I have read in the devel list that Gregory got a message saying that the build was not from the mainline CVS... well, the only thing that I can think of is this.

The EXE which is included in my one-click installers DOES NOT have its modification date set to Feb 09, 2003 like it should. If you download the above referenced files (the 2003-02-09 binary distro) and do a Properties on the EXE you will get the following modification date: Sunday, February 09, 2003, 5:48:00 PM. This is obviously as it should be. If you do a Properties for the EXE that comes with my installers, the modification date comes up as: Sunday, December 22, 2002, 12:01:54 AM. That means it was built about a month and a half before the project files which are listed on Sourceforge. All other version information seen on the windows Property sheet (from the embedded resources on the EXE) is identical.

Could it be possible that somebody had an older build that got put into the binary release from the Aleph One page? Could it be that I downloaded the version prior to the February build which is no longer available? I don't know... I am almost 100% certain that the build I downloaded was the February one, so it may be that an older EXE was included in the binary distribution when it was first released? If the build that I am using is from modified source, well, the joke is on me as well. I am certain that there are a limited number of folks who built the windows versions with the green icons embedded in the EXE, so maybe we should be asking them who built the EXE dated December 22? Nonetheless, the fact still remains that I did not build this EXE, nor did I ever modify the source code.

Moving along, here is the ONLY thing that I did with the build that I got from the Aleph One project.

- I modified the resources of the EXE. i.e. the icons embedded in the EXE. I did this with this tool:
Resource Hacker ( http://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker/ ) Once I created my own hi-res windows icons, I simply replaced the icons that were embedded in the EXE with the icons I had created. Since I was going to use external icons for the data files and point to the with a registry entry, I stripped those from the EXE, leaving only the application icon. That's it. That is the extent to which the binary was modified, and the source was never touched or even downloaded. All other modifications are done via MML scripts. Nothing I did to the EXE changed its original functionality in any way.

Next issue: The installers do not use any GPL code whatsoever. The installers were created with Clickteam Installcreator, a windows installer creation app which makes available a freeware version. ( http://www.clickteam.com/English/install_creator.htm ). These installers are simply containers for the files within. It is no more than a glorified ZIP file. I chose to use the installer instead of a ZIP file because I wanted the easiest way to get folks to be able to install Aleph/Marathon without any hassles, and to be able to launch my BAT file which installs the registry entries for the custom icons. It obviously worked, as I have not gotten a single request for help in installing them.

Next: Why do I use such an outdated version of the Aleph One EXE on windows? Two reasons. First, it had icons already embedded in it, which means that it was easy to modify in that regard. Have you ever tried adding icons to an EXE in windows that doesn't have them? It is not trivial. Second, it is the only build in windows in which the player in the overhead map can be seen (I have tested this on five PC computers). With the EXE that I am using, the player shows up as a blue triangle in the overhead map... any of the newer releases the player is a black triangle on a black background. This behavior, as of the latest windows EXE that I downloaded, is still not fixed, in addition to the fact that all newer builds of Aleph One for windows no longer have the icons resources either. So, since I intended these to be stand-alone scenarios, I picked the build that had everything working on it. If somebody wants to update them, all they have to do is download the latest windows build and drop in the new EXE and DLL's. You will lose the app icon, your player will be black on black in the overhead, you will gain nothing in terms of how the scenarios play... but HEY! You'll be using the latest release!!

The crux of this issue is that Gregory says that the EXE which is included in the one-click installers is built from modified sources. I have never used or downloaded an Aleph One EXE that was not from the Aleph One sourceforge site, so even if it was modified source, it was modified by the project maintainers. BTW, I included all the original documentation in my installers, so there is a pointer to the sourceforge site where the source should be available. As I see it, if the source for these needs to be made available, then the maintainers of the Aleph One project need to go digging and find the source code for December 22, 2002.

I will NOT update all my installer EXE's to the Feb 9th build EXE. I would have to re-do all the EXE's with resource hacker, re-build every single project with installcreator, and then send all of them to Claude again. No thanks, I have a 2 year old son on whom I would rather use all that free time. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, I think it is MUCH easier to find the Dec 22nd source and make that available. Right?

Ok, I think I have covered most of the issues involved here, so I will put and end to this already very long message. I will check the Devel list website archive for responses and any additional question, but I am unable to follow up unless somebody e-mails me, as I am not on the mailing list. I can be reached at jorge-at-salasnet.com.

Cheers,

Jorge

--END QUOTED EMAIL--

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

no morespartan84 4/22/05 7:31 a.m.
     Um...Scumbag 4/22/05 10:39 a.m.
           Re: Um...Bob-B-Q 4/22/05 11:49 a.m.
                 Re: Um...Yossarian 4/22/05 1:44 p.m.
                       Re: Um...Bob-B-Q 4/22/05 6:03 p.m.
                             Re: Um...Jorge 4/23/05 10:12 a.m.
                                   Re: Um...Bob-B-Q 4/23/05 12:24 p.m.
                                         Re: Um...Jorge 4/23/05 12:44 p.m.
                                               Re: Um...Bob-B-Q 4/23/05 5:48 p.m.

[ Post a Reply | Message Index | Read Prev Msg | Read Next Msg ]
Pre-2004 Posts

 

 

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