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cromlyngames / Skeleton_world

An unofficial guide to making Powered By The Apocalypse Hacks
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License incompatible with commercial use #1

Open eggdropsoap opened 3 years ago

eggdropsoap commented 3 years ago

The readme says “I intend that you that you can use Skeleton_World to build a hack and sell it”, but the CC BY-NC 4.0 license explicitly prohibits commercial use.

To fix, either the “I intend…” sentence should be removed, or a new release with the CC BY 4.0 license should be made.

An explanation of the error

The misunderstanding might be that, since CC BY-NC does not have the ShareAlike requirement, that someone can use this to make a hack, and then relicense their own hack without following the NC requirement. This is not true. The ShareAlike requirement is not what makes a CC license's requirements apply to later work—all it does is require sharing the source material as well as the end product. What makes a CC license's requirements apply to later derivative works is not the SA requirement, it's the basic copyright concepts that CC is built on.

Without the SA requirement, Skeleton World does not require that others share their source files when distributing their hacks. Without the SA requirement, hacks based on Skeleton World still are forever bound by the NonCommercial requirement. Practically, this means that people can make hacks based on Skeleton World, give them away for free only, and are not required to share their source files for recreating their documents. However, they are prohibited from selling their hack, or any derivative work of their hack (licenses persist through derivative works—that's just a feature of copyright, and CC is built on top of that feature).

To be clear: prohibiting sales of all derivative works is explicitly the purpose of the NC part of CC BY-NC. If the intent is that people can build on Skeleton World to make a hack and sell it, the NC requirement has to be dropped. There aren't any trade-offs either: the NC requirement brings nothing else to the table; it only prohibits commercial derivative works.

cromlyngames commented 3 years ago

Skeletonworld, the document, is licensed as non-commercial.

Skeletonworld, the guide to making your own game, makes no claim over your ownership of the game that you create.

If you use lots of words from Skeletonworld without making them yours, then that's not really on, but if you've just used it to get you to your first draft and your polished product is all your own words, then I have and intend to press no claim. Is that clearer?

eggdropsoap commented 3 years ago

I might have misunderstood your intent. Is your intent that people can take some words from Skeleton World, either cut-and-paste or rewritten in their own words to use in their own game, or is the intent that they just follow the guide and write their own words completely separately?

If it's the first, even small parts rewritten prohibit the result from being sold. If it's the second, then all's well and I misunderstood.

Edit: if the second, what is the purpose of distributing the source files at all?

cromlyngames commented 3 years ago

even small parts rewritten prohibit the result from being sold

By that criteria non of the powered by apocalypse games could exist. Or most software. I think it should be fine

Why distribute the source files at all? I'm building it in latex, so I have the source files and need to backup somewhere, and I can use GitHub to pull up change logs if needed.