pouët.net

You know the default shadertoy license(that applies if not stated otherwise in the shader source code) is CC BY-NC-SA, where the NC part means "non-commercial"... imho what you're doing sounds like a prime example of commercial use.

First of all, we don't adorn ourselves with borrowed plumes and we most certainly don't sell these shaders to anyone.
Second, it's just for in-house testing, so it's highly unlikely that you will ever get to see it anyway.
Although, I build a test framework that emulates the ShaderToy environment, and there's no harm in releasing that, right ?
Our drivers are all open source, btw (but they are still under construction and have not been released, yet).

Open Source != Not-For-Profit

LJ's point is completely valid, and any CC-NC work must not be redistributed in a commercial context (in its full entirety).

And yes, Open Source != Not-For-Profit is absolutely true, too. If only more companies would realize this.

Besides, the reality of Open Source is that practically no-one steals your work since the true value lies with the developers, not the source code.

Yeah but you're saving a lot of time(=money) using them, you're having a commercial benifit from it. Don't get me wrong I'm certain most people would be cool with providing shaders for you to test your compiler or whatever, but the way it is i feel like you're treading... very very thin ice.

you see, besides the actual driver code, I wrote ~450 test cases so far. ~30 of them are shadertoy tests. that's not saving "a lot" of money.
but your objections are valid and appreciated. It's simply not OK to copy'n'paste other people's work and not honoring their licensing terms.

hold on a second, seriously?

As far as I understand the situation, bsp sometimes pastes a bit of available (CC-NC) shader code into his (commercial) compiler tool and checks if it works.
That's very thick ice, imho.
"Thin ice" would be supplying some, maybe slightly modified, but basically copypasted shadertoy-sourced code along with the tool itself.

Take this analogy:
I sound-design a synth patch for a commercial track. In order to try it out, I play a melody from a known song with it. I do not have the rights to use that song for my commercial purposes. Still, I'm testing out my synth patch, with a commercial interest. So, strictly speaking, I should not be allowed to do that?

Long story short, this is actually a fascinating question, if we're talking about legal foo. He does not sell the cc-licensed material in any way, not even does he build upon it. But he does use it for commercial purposes.

In my understanding, he uses the shadertoy stuff to gain what you could call "personal experience", he then uses that experience for a commercial purpose. Which is fine, imho.

The question, when does "commercial use" start, is not so easy to answer...

good analogy and the question is quite clearly answered here.

And how many of those test cases are based on observations made by checking shadertoys?


Yet in your initial post you attested that the code is super valuable to you...


What about the cases you'd never have spotted without a shadertoy?
Imagine Samsung finding and fixing an exploitable memory overflow issue that would've made a big splash in media rendering their devices vulnerable, scaring customers away, costing them millions of revenue but thanks to John Does 4k shadercode that was on shadertoy it was fixed pre-release. Those things snowball.



I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that being paid to write a compiler and unit tests for it and throwing stuff at it(the compiler) during work time is by definition not "personal experience".

uhm, yeah. pretty much lthat.



After reading through the whole text:
Since bsp does not sell any of the cc-licensed stuff, everything should be good.

@LJ: following you're argument, you wouldn't be allowed to use any knowledge about the outside world to further your commercial endeavours. that would be total bullshit.

jco how about this analogy:
Studio X uses Unity free edition to prototype their next game, everyone is a payed employee, but since they're writing their own engine for the actual game thats okay and non commercial use?

So you're arguing that bsp is not primarily using the shadertoy sources for commercial purposes when he's throwing the code at his commercial software to test if it works and if not analysing the source code and writing a unit test based on it?

calm down, LJ! ;)
I see it like jco does see it!

Even if bsp would sell his Shadertool and it would be 100% compatible with all ShaderToy-shaders -> They are just shaders and they run in any simple basecode you can come up with anyway! ;)

To emphasize maybe: He seems to use some shaderToy-sources to unit-test his own shaderTool, just so he´s got some comparision...just to see if his tool is on par with shaderToy and if the shaders behave differently or not! It´s all internal if i got him right!
As long as he doesn´t package shadertoy-sources with his final product or advertises with "100% shadertoy-compatible" he´s on thick ice in my non-lawyer-brain for sure!

I guess you read it like "my tool is based on shadertoy-sourcecode" or sth alike...i think you got sth wrong here atleast! ;)

As said: calm down! :)

LJ: Unity has a different license to begin with. As far as I see it, bsp's use case is completely covered by the CC license. Whether your envisioned Unity example would be covered by Unity's license, I have no idea, since I didn't read it.

LJ: Licenses only apply to anything that is released to the public. If it's only used internally within the company—and in this case not even integrated into anything, just used as input data as I understand—the licensing doesn't apply. This is advice from a lawyer I recently had consulted on a similar professional matter (CC licenses applied to code).

After this sky's been cleared and jco's and hardy's voices of reason have been heard, what are you "jorbs" ?
This is a very interesting thread, with people from all walks of life (@urs, a 100000 supercomputer CPUs, just wow!)

noby: good point, a very reasonable line to be drawn. everything else would require a total surveillance thought police state anyway ;)

If I could edit my post, I would send greetings out to noby and Saga Musix (Amiga Sux :D), too. Be well, and fsck police states, hah.
p.s. Amigaaaa :D

A great title for SP-04, whenever that is being released!

urs case is not like amiga but more like atari 2600-style "racing the beam" -> no time for debuggers at all! :D
I wonder what fps Shadertoy reads on such a kind of connected_beast_with_the_MCP_in_Control_only_advised_by_some_BIT ! :D
Computer says 0!

Let it run for like 7.5 million years and it will answer your Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything with: "I can´t answer that! Build a better superComputer, Urs!" :D

And then someUrs will have built a superComputer named Earth, put one Woman-in-Read and one new(Urs) and one Neo and some class named Smith() and all went in an unrollable_loop forever, softlocked! ;)

The real bad thing about it was that the mice, which were the Admins of all this, put a while(true) around this in the very beginning, so figure yourself what´s next, Program!

Hardy:

I'm super calm and it doesn't matter how I, you, bsp or jco sees things, as said I bet even the majority of authors would be cool with their code being used as tests for a "GLSL shader compiler and a GLES3 driver" of a commercial embedded system, nobody ever talked about "some shadertoy alike tool developed by a single person that might choose to try to sell it at some point", next time please read the whole conversation before you chime in, thanks.

Saga:

It wouldn't be an analogy if it was the exact same case to begin with, it was about using "free for non commercial use" software in a business context, feel free to substitute Unity for any content creation software that has a version that goes under that label.

Noby:

So a company(which is a commercial entity[if its not a non-profit]) can use stuff that's licensed for "non commercial use only" as long as they only do so internally, so all software licenses or copyrights do not apply? You seriously find that to make sense? I think you might've skipped some important aspects of your specific case here.


So this is what the license states:

So everyone who says that previously mentioned usage is in line with the license says that being paid for writing a GLSL compiler and driver and throwing shadertoy sources at it to find bugs and derive unit tests from them is not done with the intend of having a commercial advantage. Its not done to save time which ultimately saves development costs, its not done cover cases that one'd not have thought of otherwise, its not primarily done to improve the stability of the commercial product that's supposed to end up in revenue. Yeah right.


With that I'm out, this discussion went down the drain the moment the first "I don't have anything to contribute except that I'm agreeing with X" post appeared.

yep, that makes sense. And to be honest, I don't quite understand why you're so confrontational.

For example, take a look at the GNU style licenses. It would be perfectly legal if I'd charge you one million dollars (*) just to get the source code. Once you have it, you'd be free to redistribute it as you like, of course.
Stallman, being a True American Patriot*, has never been a stranger to making money (but at times he had unspeakable things in his beard, just let's not get into that).
Weird ? yes. Legal ? hell yeah.

The fact that bsp is unsolicitedly sharing with us on this public thread in a very casual manner that his company is routinely using source code obtained from Shadertoy to test their product leads me to believe that he (and/or his colleagues) would likely not refrain from making similar claims in other public and possibly more commercial settings. With that, this situation could become an analogy to the case of the company that produces speakers, who are definitely allowed to put "Great to play shitty popmusic!" but clearly not "Great to play Justin Bieber songs!" on the boxes of their product, unless they struck some kind of deal with that guy who built the house right outside Hamburg Hbf.