Original music in Wesnoth content
For a few years since ESR established the new mainline conventions in Wesnoth for tagging and adding new contributed music tracks, I've been in charge of helping with the process of importing tracks since ESR doesn't seem to be available for this anymore, and our “Lords” of Music never get familiarized with SVN to do it themselves. Normally I'm asked to do this whenever I'm available, but for some reason, another developer did it this time on March 13th — that is, two days ago — and I didn't find it out until today.
This minor thing reminded me of a substantial problem with campaign music in Wesnoth in regards to originality, which I've been perceiving for a few months already.
“Our” musicians contribute high-quality (understatement) tunes to the project despite the lack of any kind of formal affiliation or contract with us. They are, basically, non-paid volunteers who dedicate their time and money to producing music for mainline Wesnoth, generally not for a particular scenario or campaign — although the tracks are designed to be used in specific circumstances and moods.
There's a huge amount of battle music that tends to fit any campaign and scenario due to the game's nature. It's a turn-based strategy game, after all, not an RPG or adventure game — or at least, not necessarily.
Some add-ons, however, tend to stretch the game engine and wrap it around different genres or gameplay styles at different levels. Invasion from the Unknown and (cursed to be trapped in Development Hell for who knows how long) After the Storm especially love to do this and confuse the hell out of unwary Wesnoth players. As a consequence, battle music is not always fitting, and non-battle music in mainline will still not fit very well since it gets just so monotone after three underground exploration scenarios.
The basic idea here is that, unless it's battle music, it must be original for every campaign or it gets damn boring.
These musicians would most likely not work producing music for every single mainline campaign — we are talking of 15 campaigns as of 1.8 RC 1 — unless we hired them to compose tracks under contract. Most likely, not going to happen very soon.
User-made add-ons are even more doomed than mainline campaigns in regards to artwork, music and sound effects because they don't matter to anyone but the users until some random mainline developer (who's most likely to be ESR nowadays) decides to bless some add-on he or she likes and throw it into mainline at some cost.
But, in the hypothetical case that a musician decides to work with a mainline or user-made campaign maintainer, we fall into another problem that trumps originality: Wesnoth content must be licensed under the GNU GPL (version 2 or later) or at least under terms that allow free redistribution for commercial or non-commercial purposes. This means that such terms will unavoidably grant other Wesnoth content authors the right to reuse original content (in this case, music) from other mainline or user-made campaigns. While asking for permission is encouraged, it's not mandatory and even if the hypothetical maintainer of this campaign with original music disapproved, those tracks would appear elsewhere in other campaigns and people would not necessarily relate them to this blessed campaign if they didn't play it first. And the better the tune is, the highest the chances are other content authors will want to reuse it.
Even if random (often clueless) user-made campaign authors didn't reuse it, the mainline developers (except me!) would most likely want to hijack the tune and move it to core (/data/core), therefore making it directly available for any campaign or scenario to use, and implicitly declaring it “generic” for anyone to use.
All this makes the idea of having original music in a campaign rather useless under the current lenient licensing terms. Speaking as the author and (so-so) maintainer of the aforementioned two campaigns, it is a lesser necessarily evil if we want to have a free (as in freedom) open-source game with high-quality content open to contributors, but it's annoying and limiting nevertheless — originality is a factor that depends on the actual campaigns and scenarios rather than the artwork, music and sound effects they use, since the latter can ultimately be original only in the context of Wesnoth versus other games.
I had thought about using the music track I mentioned at the start of this post in After the Storm, right after a particular point in the storyline where it'd have fit nicely. However, the same day I considered this (one day after Doug Kaufman presented it in the Music & Sound Development forum), I dropped the idea, foreseeing that someone would add it to mainline anyway and predicting that random UMC would also make use of it in some time, thus turning it into yet another generic tune.
This is not exactly motivating me to work in AtS at the moment. It's been around one month and a half without commits to the tree in Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, and it'll probably be some additional months (or years) before I regain my self-confidence and creativity. I sometimes think (and some people have suggested it as well) that I'm trying too hard to make something in revenge for what happened with IftU, instead of just writing a fun add-on for fun. Maybe I should let it be and completely move on to more relaxed, non-Wesnoth projects where I'm not in charge of taking fundamental decisions, at least for a while.