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Licensing and Version Control!

Discussion in 'Mobius Engine Project' started by Gen, Mar 9, 2012.

  1. Sofox

    Sofox

    Member
    With the revival of this project, I'm thinking of changing the license to MIT.

    This reason is that the license is clear, understood and flexible. While it's possible to commercially release a game under LGPL or dual license the engine, ultimately it's confusing and the idea of this project is to make a widespread and popular game engine, and ultimately, lead to a lot of high quality 3d games being created who were helped into being by the existence of this project. This is hard to do if the developers are suddenly afraid that some legal detail will set back all the work they put into the project (of course, this is very unfair. GPL and open source are important licenses, it's just that when you're engaging in a project that's going to last for months with a lot of personal investment and creation of new things, many people want to be absolutely sure they can do whatever they want with it afterwards).

    As James stated, both SDL and Ogre3d went to more permissive licenses. A more recent addition to the list is the Torque Game Engine by GarageGame, which many developers were happy to see. The main problem with a permissive license is that someone can take the code and move in their own direction with it. I think that's a chance worth taking as ultimately, it'll still lead to a new game in the world that wouldn't exist without our project. I know the idea of someone profiting off our work isn't the best feeling in the world, but ultimately the goal of this project is to help game developers while creating something we can be proud of that leads to a lot of good things being created. Also, any game that uses our engine will still have to attribute the our Project (under the MIT license).

    I believe there are other things to say on this, such as how it will be important to foster good relationships with developers so we can help eachother, but ultimately I think I've covered my important points.

    Unless there's strong opposition to this, I intend to change the license in the next few days.
     
  2. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    Sonic (?): Coming summer of 2055...?
    I don't know much about licenses and whatnot, but ultimately, what I want is a game engine created by members of this community. What is done with it by others after the fact isn't of much concern to me, as long as they aren't claiming the engine as their own. So I'm okay with this.
     
  3. Sofox

    Sofox

    Member
    Found a website that gives simple summaries of various open source licenses.

    Take a look if you want to know more.

    MIT: http://www.tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license

    LGPL: http://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-%28lgpl-3.0%29
     
  4. Aerosol

    Aerosol

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    Sonic (?): Coming summer of 2055...?
    Thanks for that.

    While aspects of the LGPL are attractive (namely, the fact that the original source code must be included in all distributions [unless I read that wrong]), ultimately I do prefer the MIT license. You're right, it's just as, is not more flexible than LGPL, and would reduce confusion down the chain (if that happens).
     
  5. Sofox

    Sofox

    Member
    Cool.

    I'll give it a few more days for others to speak up, then if there are no objections I'll update the LICENSE.txt file in the source code repository to contain the terms of the MIT license.
     
  6. Sofox

    Sofox

    Member
    I've changed the license to MIT in the most recent update.
     
  7. Sofox

    Sofox

    Member
    To confirm, the source code repository is at: https://bitbucket.org/Sofox/mobius-game-engine