Third Party Development Community

[Vam]

Count me in. I recently released ChatBat on Github but I also love Gitlab and would be happy to move it over to your group. I'd also appreciate code reviews, and would be happy to attempt to give code reviews. I was a professional developer up until very recently, so I understand how valuable that process is.

I spent most of last weekend digging myself into a bad hole with ChatBat and hope to undo some of the damage this weekend. The problems stem from not being familiar with the ins and outs of extension development. I need to re-check my understanding of some fundamentals to see where I went off the rails. I use IntelliJ IDEA to edit Lua files, which is amazing and really helps me to find relevant code in the rulesets to what I'm working on. I should probably lean more on the forum and discord.

Thanks for initiating this.

[daddyogreman]

Awesome!

So the whole goal here is that there's not just one person holding the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. I've made a discord server. While I'm happy to be an admin of the group, I'm gonna look into what it means in gitlab to put a project under the group vs just sharing it with the group.
I DO know if you actually start a project under the group there are group wide permission settings that the project will inherit, unless you override them. This does mean, I believe, that admins of the group are also admins of your project. I'm not sure if this can be changed but I'm going to look into it.
I do however think there should be on hard rule - any project either within the group or shared by it should be GNU GPL licensed. I think it only fair if you're going to use group resources to help with your project, you should be giving that project back the community without restrictions.
Anyhow, I'm going to do a bit of research into gitlab. Anyone wanting to join the group should send me a PM with their email or join up on the discord server and I will send you an invite to the gitlab group. Thus far I'm not planning on using anything that requires a paid subscription to gitlab - though if people are setting up builds with their projects (which I whole heartedly encourage and am happy to help out with!) we may eventually be bumping into the max free CI/CD minutes of gitlab - which I think is 400 minutes per month. So that might be something we have to visit if we approach this limit.
I'm not an expert at all when it comes to writing extensions. I've written one tiny one. But if we get some folks in here, we can start helping each other out!
Another case in point - if some of these extensions were in here that have been updated for the new new rulesets, and were done so using squashed merge requestes, people such as myself could go in after the fact and look to see exactly what was needed to get the extensions working again and potentially go and do the same thing with their own! Or at least use it for some guidance.

[daddyogreman]

Ah perfect. So there IS a couple approaches here if you want your project to be part of this. Whatever the approach, you should become a member of the group in gitlab. Just ask and I'll make you a member of the umbrella group Fantasy Grounds. The approaches:
1) You make your projects within that group then, or within any of the sub groups.
The pro and con here - Anyone that has permissions to the group itself will have those same permissions within your project. If you want to fully share ownership of the project, this might be the path for you. However, I totally get it if people don't want to go this route - I'm not so sure even I am willing to just willy nilly give permissions to folks I don't know. Sooo...the second approach, which might be the better of the two, for now at least:
2)
You just share your project with the Fantasy Grounds group. In this case, you maintain control over your project, you decide what level of permissions people in the group have to your project (I'd recommend developer as folks in the group can fork and submit merge requests, but can't touch any of your protected branches) and you can revoke those permissions at any point. The project stays under your gitlab URL and you can change your mind at any point and back out of the group. Keeping in mind I think we will have a requirement that all projects involved in this group are GNU GPL'd, so even if you back out whatever you've done to that point will still fall under that license.

This is exciting! Let me know and I'll get you on board as part of the group and set up on the discord server! And I'm going to share my one extension with that group under the developer level!

[daddyogreman]

Just shared my project with the gitlab group and I definitely think it's the way to go vs having the projects actually in the group. Anyone in that group will now by default have developer access to my project but I retain control of it - I can revoke group access to the project if I want. I could individually add higher access to members of the group I grow to trust, etc.
Now I just need some emails for people that want to join up!

[daddyogreman]

Got a discord server up and running. Pretty bare bones at the moment. But I'm kinda envisioning the discord server being the main form of communication and the gitlab group being how you're granted access to the various repositories.

[Trenloe]

I do however think there should be on hard rule - any project either within the group or shared by it should be GNU GPL licensed. I think it only fair if you're going to use group resources to help with your project, you should be giving that project back the community without restrictions.

I'd be very careful about using the GNU GPL license, for a number of reasons. The general allowance by SmiteWorks for people to use/base their extensions on existing FG code is that they're using that code with permission from SmiteWorks and that any extension code based on FG code could be merged back into the base product. Release of an extension under the GPL make's it very difficult for SmiteWorks to do that. And, for most parts, you're taking FG code released under a different license and then releasing it under the GPL, which could be invalidating the license the FG code was released under.

I'm all for people developing FG extensions using existing FG code as the basis and giving back to the community. I also very much like seeing extension code becoming a part of the base product. Releasing an extension under the GPL could make the former break the SmiteWorks license for that code and make the latter very hard/impossible.

For example, I specifically don't release my code under a GPL. I allow other community developers to use that code - out of politeness and courtesy I expect them to ask my permission and give me credit. Because my extensions all use SmiteWorks code to some extent (it'll be virtually impossible for them not to), SmiteWorks can take any aspect of that code and release it in any Fantasy Grounds products. In fact, a number of my extensions have made it back into the Fantasy Grounds base code. If I'd released my extension code under the GPL SmiteWorks couldn't do that without breaking GPL and non-GPL code out into separate files and detailing separate licenses - making the task very difficult for them and probably not making it worth their while, resulting in less/no community code making it back into the base product.

I'm completely behind releasing FG extensions to the community and making it clear what the usage requirements/license that the work is released under, as long as that doesn't change the original license/requirements any code being used was released under, and that it doesn't result in SmiteWorks not being able to use that code in the future to make it available to all via the base FG product. So, if anyone releases FG extensions to the community please be aware of whatever license you're releasing the code under, whether you can actually use that license to change existing code, and what the implications of using that license are.

[Moon Wizard]

If you are using our code as the basis to develop your extensions, or copying our code to replace assets/scripts; you do not have the rights to enter that code into another license. You should be clear that only new code created for your community project is covered under whatever license you choose; and that code copied from our code remains under our license.

Also, to Trenloe's point; we can't incorporate any code which is under a license not owned by the author, so open source license projects will most likely never be considered for incorporation since they would have to be rewritten from scratch.

Regards,
JPG

[Vam]

Agreed on the GPL thing. I wanted to put an MIT license on my ChatBat extension, but I wanted to double check that I hadn't copied anything out of SmiteWorks code. I know I've copied a line of code here or there, but I don't think a single line of code should be an issue.

I've joined the discord server, and I'll cooperate with the GitLab project one way or another. I'm hoping to put up an early release of what I was working on yesterday, which is a FG test harness for unit and behavioural tests. I finished a first pass of my gherkin parser last night, and used a TDD approach with the unit testing features to build it. I'm hoping to add support for Lua promises to support async behaviour and get some documentation together today before I do an initial release, and then I'll use it for real with ChatBat which will certainly result in fixes and enhancements.

I really like the idea of peer code reviews, since I'm pretty new to both writing extensions and Lua itself.

[Kelrugem]

Yes, I am also against the GPL thingy (In the case of my height extension I could not avoid it because of the original author; but when I start writing codes again, I intend to rewrite it to get rid of the GPL license) In my opinion the license should be like: Smiteworks is allowed and can integrate the code if they want, and in case of a community dev, those can use and change as they want, but they should mention other people as authors then, too, and the code should only be used for free extensions (for the latter: At least there should be of course communication with all authors when someone wants to sell stuff, in the forge for example As for me, I do not want to sell code)

[Vam]

I'm happy for anyone who can use my code to do so, for any purpose. The only right I need to assert is one that prevents someone else from claiming ownership in such a way as to prevent me or others from using that code. If I wanted to code for money I think there are more effective ways to do so. Although some paid extension writers might know better!