Concerns regarding "Owned Vehicle" options.
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I didn't want to mention this before, but since it appears Simms was behind the leak and supplying our code for use in GTA Online, I want to communicate my concern regarding his "Owned Vehicle" features which he checked in a few days ago.
I'm concerned that these features are, to a much larger degree, targeted towards online play than single player. In single player, I can't really see the need for options like "Kick Owned Vehicle's Current Driver" or "Explode Owned Vehicle". NPCs don't really steal player cars.
Online, however, people steal each others' vehicles all the time, and so these options could be used for griefing. Someone steals your car? Kick them out, or blow them up. Get spawned far away from your car after a mission? Just "retrieve" it. I just see very little in this feature that is practical in single player, and seems to have been designed for online play under the guise of being a single player feature.
Feel free to remove them. The more code of his that's replaced, the better.
I propose that all of his commits are reverted.
This repository does not have a contributor license agreement and he could cause a lot of problems.
In addition, I believe "owned vehicles" are only applicable to online and it's highly likely that the single player mechanism for the player owned vehicle is very different to that of online. Of course, I may be wrong here, but you're absolutely correct: NPCs don't really steal player cars. You wouldn't really gain anything by those owned vehicle features in single player.
I share this concern, to a limited extent, limited because demonstrable history will make it very difficult to enforce a claim. Nonetheless the whole state of our licensing is a shambles now, and something of a liability, especially if someone malicious tries to use this as a vector. Of course, I'm using DMCA against other people, so it's not beyond possibility.
I'm not deeply au fait with Git but I think it's going to be very difficult to literally revert what he did. A lot of it has already been refactored into meaninglessness, and some of his stuff (enums) has been publicly shared anyway.
I think we probably need to make an effort to chop out his stuff in one go and clearly label it as such.
I've had a decent stab at this. A fair bit has been removed. Neons are left alone because I rewrote it. Engine power is left alone because one of you guys rewrote it. Enums are left alone because it was given away to everyone. Other bits will remain but you can expect them to be rewritten or significantly reworked before release.
Just for further avoidance of doubt, should this ever come up:
This all happened because our code was leaked to a known abuser of it, a group called "Nigger Menu", who used our code to form a product, then modified it and sold it on without releasing source, thus were in contravention of the GPL license that we had at this time.
Unfortunately, it was only after the fact that I was able to establish a relationship between "Nigger Menu" and Danny Simms, via combination of now deleted Reddit, forum and BitBucket accounts appearing in Google Cache.
Therefore, as suggested in this thread, it was necessary to remove all of his work to avoid future copyright issues.