MSFS Carenado Mooney Panel

[Ralph]

There's a bit of an issue with these instruments. They were created by Shane McClure, he's the author. So you've claimed his work, made it available outside of Air Manager, and even for commercial purposes. I don't know about the legibility of this, but morally speaking it isn't a nice thing to do. I am going to discuss this with the original author, and ask his opinion.

[Keith Baxter]

There's a bit of an issue with these instruments. They were created by Shane McClure, he's the author. So you've claimed his work, made it available outside of Air Manager, and even for commercial purposes. I don't know about the legibility of this, but morally speaking it isn't a nice thing to do. I am going to discuss this with the original author, and ask his opinion.

Ralph,

I read this confused and surprised it has not gathered air by other members. The OP indicated he manipulated the instruments from a store instrument to enable other members to use with another airframe. This is totally acceptable IMHO and should be encouraged. Accreditation to the origin would be courteous and expected as I think the OP as a new member @Evil-Alan with 4 posts to-date did.

Is there something I am missing here? Plagiarism and indications of, are not cool, especially where financial gain and/or popularisation are concerned.

Keith

[Sling]

Keith,

I believe the potential issue here is that the gauges are being hosted away from the Air manager repository and permission was not sought from the author before this happened. The submission license agreement at the head of the submission window states 'You reserve the right to remove your instrument(s) from our online store at any point.'. If at some point in the future an author wishes for whatever reason to remove something then having it away from the store complicates the situation. Another smaller thing is credit to the original author should be given in the instrument info description. I think these couple have it in the lua code but not the instrument info.

My personal view is you should not update someone else's instrument without first checking with them if its going to be distributed. Perhaps putting ones name to an instrument after making a smaller modification to it could also be an issue. Think about how one would feel if you spent days working to complete an instrument and then had someone else put themselves as author after adding a few lines for something at a later date. Perhaps a contributing authors box within the instrument info is needed or maybe a general policy that excludes changing the originating author.

I agree that we want to encourage updates and new instruments but there has to be some considerations for the things discussed here. I would just like to say that this is not a dig at the OP at all. I like you believe that the original intention was one of wanting to give something back to the community and was not at all intended to cause an issue. Its just the method used that has spiked this discussion. The OP acknowledged that he didn't realise some of this initially hence why its now become a talking point.

Just my thoughts. I'd be interested to here what others think.

[Ralph]

I totally agree with Tony, nicely explained. I also do not assume that there's any false intention, and I don't think the original author would be in any way angry about what happened. But it is something to take into consideration: should I publish someone else's work without asking the original author for permission?

[Keith Baxter]

I totally agree with Tony, nicely explained. I also do not assume that there's any false intention, and I don't think the original author would be in any way angry about what happened. But it is something to take into consideration: should I publish someone else's work without asking the original author for permission?

Guys,

I might have misinterpreted Ralph's previous post.
The discord has this rule which prohibits code etc shared from being used for commercial purposes.

9) All data, coding and sources shared are done so without rights. They become open source and available for non commercial use.

It has however brought up some very important points. It might be worth publishing a guide and ethics note

I like the suggestion of Tony that there should be a succession box with authors that do updates for other AirFrame houses and sim's.
It could be that a checkbox be provided so that the original author gives permission or not for others to make these updates.

Keith

[jph]

Hi Keith,
There ARE things being raised by other members, not necessarily posted on the forum.
The OP may well have the very best intentions, I am sure he does.
However, It is not appropriate in my opinion to simply take someone else's work and publish it on an external site without the original authors permission.
The link in the original post also linked to a GNU in the license part of the directory that specifically applied permissions for commercial use !.
That has now been removed. Even then, it is not up to someone else to arbitrarily decide to even apply any form of GNU or GPL if one never existed in the first place. . If any form of GPL / GNU is specifically stated then the conditions of commercialism should be written into the package as the GPL, for example, allows commercial gain if one intends it,
Again, I am 100% sure that the OPs intentions are 100% above board. It is a case where the rules for these things need clarifying and publishing.

It is also to be considered that the original author may well decide to put a notice header in his release that the images/ graphics / software etc are NOT to be published or posted outside of the official Sim Innovations store / website.
Joe.

[JackZ]

Old issue as ever: the instruments published in the Store are kinda « open source » since they are not protected whatsoever, so it’s easy to « borrow » resources or code and claim these your own.

That’s somewhat what prevented me (and I guess Tony at least) to publish some of my advanced instruments, as if I was okay to share the result of my work to others for free, I wasn’t prepared to give away all the work itself (code and resources).
And having to risk to be pillaged and or/reused without proper credits or even worse be taken profit of.

I regret there is no way in AM to lock the code and resource for us developers if ever wished, pretty much like in SASL gauges or plugins. This feat being reserved to AM own paid instruments.

[Evil-Alan]

It's been a few weeks since I looked at this thread (I had some personal issues that led me to not to be online for a few weeks) and it seems that the developers of AirManager feel I am violating policy and/or stealing someone else's work. In addition it seems that I did not follow the proper procedures to publish a community instruments. I hope it is understood that my intention was not to take credit for someone else's work but to make a similar panel for a different aircraft in MSFS. I believe I made that clear both in this post and in the comments of the lua code. Yes I used the community images and changed the much of the original code to work for a different aircraft in a different sim.

However, that being said I am not looking to make the developers or the community unhappy here or violate any policy. I have removed the repository from github and in the future I may create new images and work on posting the instruments to the community through the store. It was also noted that any duplicate instruments for the same aircraft would need a good reason to be allowed on the store and as I stated I think there are some differences between how the Alabeo version of the Mooney on Xplane and and the Carenado versions MSFS present data from the sim. I don't know this for sure but I had to change some things to get all the instruments and gauges to display the data as it appeared in the sim.

I made some of the older X-Plane Mooney stuff a while back while I was just learning everything. I’m sure if you are more familiar with coding you probably caught some mistakes. Those were my first ones made so go easy on me! Haha. MSFS2020 wasn’t even thought up when I made those!

Last it seems that from the comments the forum user Mccluress is the original author of the Xplane version. First off great work! If you would like to work together to update your community panels to support MSFS I'd love to share what I have done with you, assuming you haven't already grabbed it from github when it was available. I do not think the modification I have made will work well on the Alabeo Mooney in Xplane but perhaps we could use some conditionals to support both aircraft somehow. I am pretty new to AirManager but I am fairly familiar with lua itself as I use it professionally for an application I manage.

Again apologies to the devs and the community.

[Evil-Alan]

I totally agree with Tony, nicely explained. I also do not assume that there's any false intention, and I don't think the original author would be in any way angry about what happened. But it is something to take into consideration: should I publish someone else's work without asking the original author for permission?

Ralph, how do you obtain that person's permission? As far as I can tell there is no way to get an email address, forum name or any point of contact information to even ask the question. Sure the author's name is there but what good is that without some point of contact? There are lots of Bob Smith's out there, are we suppose to track down the one Bob Smith who uses AirManager to ask for permission? Please let me know if I am missing something that would let me contact the actual author. I did not try to steal anyone's code and I think I went out of my way to give credit to the original author as best as I could. My intentions were merely to benefit the community.

[brlowe]

Here is a pic of the Mooney Panel I put together. It is still a work in progress as Crunch has completed a fuel selector I do not have on here. He also did the flap and trim indicators.
I need to stretch it out a little more to fill the whole space. But as you can see you should be able to do it no problem.