[PerryPlatypus]

I'll pretense this by saying I've recently become employed at an engineering firm doing rail design. Occasionally, our team likes to have animation videos showing how a train can use the facility we have designed. For example, an aerial view showing how a unit train wraps its way through a loading or unloading balloon track.

Currently, for these animations, we have a team at another office within our company do the actual animation work in an animation program. However, the animation team has had a hard time understanding rail operations.

This leads me to my question. I have read that Open Rails is "open source", but I don't know exactly what that means (if it is more towards the "freeware only" or the "public domain" end of the spectrum). If it was possible, our rail design team would use the Open Rails environment to create animations of trains going through layouts (routes) that we designed.

Obviously by taking this route, all objects (locos, rolling stock, buildings, track objects, textures, terrain, etc.) would need to be made by our team or properly acquired.

I would appreciate an authoritative answer from the OR team on whether recording a video of trains moving in the OR environment, using only rolling stock, track, and scenery objects that we own, would be a breach of the license that Open Rails is under. Inevitably, our engineering firm would be making money off of the overall projects that these animations would be incorporated into.

I understand this may be a sensitive issue, thus why I am wanting to discuss this in the open rather than appearing to do anything in secret behind anyone's back. We would only use Open Rails for this purpose if it was 100% legal to do so.

Then there is the question of how we would design routes in the first place. One method would be using the old MSTS editor, but I highly doubt Microsoft would be keen on that without us paying some BIG money, so I am not seriously considering that. As for TSRE, I am unsure if Goku would allow use of his editor to create routes that would be animated and could be incorporated into professional, commercial products.

If this is a non-permitted way to use Open Rails, that is fine, I would just appreciate a clear answer with the legal justification to back it up. OR and TSRE are already being used to develop third party payware routes and products for Open Rails, but I understand it may not be an apples-to-apples comparison.

Lastly, I have noted that the OR website says "You use Open Rails entirely at your own risk. It is intended for entertainment purposes only and is not suitable for professional applications." To be clear, our intended use of Open Rails would be strictly for the sake of animation/visuals, NOT for determining anything related to train performance/physics, as I believe this quote refers.

Hopefully we can have a productive, positive conversation about this.

Thank you!

[conductorchris]

Congrats, Sean. Who are you working for?

This strikes me as a big opportunity for open rails. I think it is reasonable for Open Rails to have an expectation that ongoing professional users contribute some money back towards the open rails and TSRE project for further development.

I also think it would make sense for your firm to pay content providers rather than have to start from scratch. Or you may want to hire content providers as sub contractors to create your work rather than do it in house.

Christopher

[cjakeman]

Hi Sean,

PerryPlatypus, on 27 August 2018 - 11:38 AM, said:

This leads me to the real question. I have heard/read that Open Rails is "open source", but I do not know what that really means (if it is more towards the "freeware only" or the "public domain" end of the spectrum). If it was possible, our rail design team would use the Open Rails environment to create animations of trains going through layouts we designed.

Open Rails is published under the GNU General Public License (GPL) This is a rather unconventional license that places obligations on you only if you re-distribute Open Rails. If you want to use Open Rails within your organisation, you are free to do so without asking permission and to change the code as you wish. Also no fees are payable. either and you can use Open Rails to earn income.

PerryPlatypus, on 27 August 2018 - 11:38 AM, said:

Lastly, I have noted that the OR website says "You use Open Rails entirely at your own risk. It is intended for entertainment purposes only and is not suitable for professional applications."

This statement is there to protect the Open Rails project. If Open Rails is used professionally, for example in training rail staff, then any shortcoming of the simulation might lead to Open Rails being held liable. As we have no funds, then that would be the end of the project, so although the risk is small, we are not willing to take it.

I hope that clarifies some points for you and encourages you to investigate further.

[PerryPlatypus]

conductorchris: Thanks! The company is HDR, an international company that does engineering, architecture, etc. I was quite blessed to be able to go into a career in rail engineering straight out of college.

As Chris Jakeman said (and what I was figuring) since OR is under the GPL license, they cannot expect to be paid for the product (and I think even if any engineering firm wanted to, they couldn't accept it if I understand things correctly).

My guess is that the use of Open Rails will be relatively small within our company, used by possibly just one rail group at this particular office. Of course, I could be wrong, and we could end up showing other offices how to use it.

Again, considering this might be used only by our one office, it may not make sense for us to outsource to current OR/MSTS 3rd party providers and/or professional 3D modelers. Our videos will mostly be bird's eye views of operations from a very conceptual basis, so we might not need high-end locomotives and rolling stock (that will be up to my boss). My own experience in route editing and modeling may be enough to suffice. The animation team we have been using so far uses very generic, block-shaped monochromatic engines and cars, so it won't be difficult to improve over that! Either way, I will mention it to my boss. There is a chance there may be people within our own company capable of doing some good 3D modeling.

Thank you for the clarification, Chris Jakeman. I had read the GPL license, and I had a hunch that it meant we could use it, but I wanted to hear it directly from an OR developer as opposed to assuming I was understanding the legal workings of GNU.

And I figured the disclaimer statement was there to protect against exactly what you said, thus why I wanted to assure everyone that we would not be using it for locomotive training and/or physics calculations.

Does this post:
http://www.elvastowe...252#entry207252

imply that Goku's route editor is under the same exact usage terms as Open Rails? In which case, we can use both OR and TSRE to develop small exhibition routes of conceptual designs, and then record them for our use?

A last note: this may require my boss or someone else at my company to contact the team via the OR website just to get a written confirmation that we are good to go on this, as discussed. Just to make sure we have our bases all covered.

[cjakeman]

PerryPlatypus, on 27 August 2018 - 02:34 PM, said:

A last note: this may require my boss or someone else at my company to contact the team via the OR website just to get a written confirmation that we are good to go on this, as discussed. Just to make sure we have our bases all covered.

No problem. I'll look out for it, Sean, and respond appropriately.

[James Ross]

PerryPlatypus, on 27 August 2018 - 11:38 AM, said:

This leads me to my question. I have read that Open Rails is "open source", but I don't know exactly what that means (if it is more towards the "freeware only" or the "public domain" end of the spectrum). If it was possible, our rail design team would use the Open Rails environment to create animations of trains going through layouts (routes) that we designed.

Obviously by taking this route, all objects (locos, rolling stock, buildings, track objects, textures, terrain, etc.) would need to be made by our team or properly acquired.

I would appreciate an authoritative answer from the OR team on whether recording a video of trains moving in the OR environment, using only rolling stock, track, and scenery objects that we own, would be a breach of the license that Open Rails is under. Inevitably, our engineering firm would be making money off of the overall projects that these animations would be incorporated into.

To add to what Chris has said:

Firstly, we're not lawyers, so you may still need to get your legal team to check things over even if we say it's okay.

That said, it all sounds good to me; the GPL requirements basically boil down to ensuring that source code is available to anyone who uses any derivative products. If you don't make any code changes to Open Rails, or make changes but don't distribute the result outside of your organisation, then you're under no obligations from the GPL AFAICS (monetary or otherwise). You'll need the appropriate rights to use any content shown in your animations (route, rolling stock, etc.) but it also sounds like you're going to do that.

Finally, this sounds like a cool use of Open Rails! Some options that may be useful to you:

• General > Control confirmation - disable this to hide the messages that appear when using keyboard commands
  
• Video > Dynamic shadows - enable this to get real-time shadows rendered (there's also a bunch of customisation you can do to make them crisper if you are only viewing short distances and so on, let us know if we can be any help there)

[Goku]

You can use TSRE for your work for free. It's licensed under GPL license, so if you don't want to make changes in this software, then no other license is required.
You can make commercial work using GPL software.
You can also find free help on this forum here:
http://www.elvastowe...iting-software/

Also, if you require different license, custom features or anything else, then I'm open to suggestions. Of course in this case nothing for free.
TSRE is already used by other railway company for visualizations and train driving. But these features are not documented and made mostly on request.

[conductorchris]

Despite Goku and James saying the software is free, I still would urge you to think about a way for HDR to make a contribution, either with money or by releasing you to contribute to the project in some other way. I'm not part of the open rails project, just someone who has been involved in open source software. I think it is important that we give back when we can.
Christopher

[Mike B]

conductorchris, on 28 August 2018 - 01:12 PM, said:

Despite Goku and James saying the software is free, I still would urge you to think about a way for HDR to make a contribution, either with money or by releasing you to contribute to the project in some other way. I'm not part of the open rails project, just someone who has been involved in open source software. I think it is important that we give back when we can.
Christopher

I'd agree - it's not a payment for the software, but a donation to the cause. Assuming OR is set up as a nonprofit someplace, the donation might even be tax-deductible (makes it easier to sell to the CFO).

I'd echo the recommendation that legal look it over. Make sure they look at grey areas too. A strict reading of the GPL supports what's been said: if you modify the code and distribute it, you have to license it under the GPL as well. But there have been more liberal readings as well, allegedly applying the requirement to anything you create with a GPL tool, such as compiling software using the gcc compiler suite (which naturally includes some library code in the process). Don't let it scare you off of using OR, just make sure legal has the bases covered; those more expansive views are often quite theoretical. And I find it hard to understand how a movie that's created, in part, using OR could fall under the GPL just because of that. After all, people use things like Gimp, Open/LibreOffice, and MySQL all the time (all of which are licensed under the GPL or something similar) without the resulting work "accidentally" becoming GPL as well. For that matter, does using ArcGIS to create a map give ESRI an interest in the map itself (I think not)?