Licensing and CVS Collaboration

#1 There's now a Notes field in people's profiles that meentions that they own the SDK, if they do.

#2 I suppose that verifying the member page, the notes field, and the address you get the email from are enough? I want to verify this though :)

-J

#3 As a last resort you could confirm that someone has posted to one of the private forums.

#4 Create a server page (php, asp, cgi, whatever) that takes a username and password, runs cvs.exe to use that information to log into GG cvs. If that works, create the account.

The only problem is that the user could just change the GG password after the fact... oh wait, what was the goal of this exercise again? heh.

--Dave

#5 How do I go about verifying SDK owners for access to a CVS repository which includes the Torque source code?

I am o.k. with hand verification thru email... doesn't need to be terribly fancy... hax0ring isn't a huge issue, as the ip of the server would only be sent on approval ... I imagine Torque is in much less secure places then this... *ahem*

I understand that this specific project (PyTorque) may be a new situation to think about... it isn't in the context of a small team working on a game... it is something that perhaps a large number of Torque users will be interested in... there is also potential for bringing in people who wouldn't use Torque otherwise... and so will obviously want access to this code...

If Garage Games is keen on seeing PyTorque developed... perhaps hosting it's CVS would be an option? Otherwise, what do I need to do?

For quick reference:

PyTorque - Vision Statement and Initial Roadmap

TGEPython - Torque Embedded Python and Documentation

Thanks,
-J

#6 Josh,

Have a gander at the persons profile, in the note's section it will say

Quote:Torque SDK Owner

. That is set via a call (I assume) into GG's MySQL DB.

Other than the above, you could also (in the profile) click on

Quote:# threads

or

Quote:# posts

and see if they created/made any

Quote:private

forum threads/posts.

Regards,

-Ron

#7 Could you not check for the Torque owner note then email the public email in that profile the URL / IP? If people don't have a working email there, then they can change it temporarily run the script and swap it back.

Doesn't that get round using someone elses details for verification?

#8 You could give them a magic string to put in their user description. Then your script runs, and checks that page for the magic string and the sdk owner entry. It's a little clunky, but not too bad.

I personally rather like the CVS idea, though it does require you to give out your password...

Best case, of course, would be if GG were very nice and let you use their CVS, or at least let you hook into their authentication system... Perhaps a simple verification ticket system would do the trick, and be applicable to other situations. (In case a special-case for PyTorque wasn't as acceptable/interesting for GG as a generic verify-a-user system.)

(The system I have in mind would work like PayPal's system. You go to 3rdparty website, hit the "verify me with GG button", which causes their code to submit a request to GG. You log in to GG (following the link), and see under "verification requests", "PyTorque" or "Ben's Cool Feature" or whatever. You acknowledge, and GG posts back to the site, which triggers it to enable your account. Safe, simple, and effective. The only issue is if you authorize things other people requested... but you can also give out your password to other people, too.)

#9 The ideal situation is for GG to host branches, then you just pull up the tag for "Hook_Release_1_1_0" or "PyTorque_1_1_5", or get "Hook" or "PyTorque" for their respectie heads.

The problem, of course, is that it saturates yet more GG bandwidth to the cvs servers, and I'm sure everyone will come running because they HAVE to fork the codebase, so GG spends a lot of time configuring and setting these up, but then find that maybe 10% of the users actually use their branches.

An alternative is to allow branch creation only after you're verified as a "contributing member" of the community, base on resource, patch, forum and article submissions.

#10 I am interested in the outcome of the new branch discussion... though, I do see a need to be able to host something like the PyTorque project in a seperate CVS... even if this uses the (inevitable) new branch... not everyone will want to use Torque as a Python module... though they really should :)

-J

#11 This is where I bring Jay's attention to this thread :)

#12 I'm guessing this is a really bad time to be bringing stuff like this up, with people's attention being focused on GDConf it could very well be missed. Post again in a week or two ;)