Relicense

[JamieMagee]

It is rather unusual for a software project to be licensed under a Creative Commons license. CC licenses are intended for creative material (writing, art, music, etc.). Normally software uses a license like MIT or Apache.

Creative Commons even advises against using their licenses for software

Github has a help page about how to add a new license to a project.

[phr00t]

Those other licenses allow for commercial use, which I'm not ready to provide at this moment.

[JamieMagee]

Thanks for the reply. I just realised that I attached the wrong link to the Creative Commons website. It was supposed to be this page.

I can totally understand if you don't want to relicense. So I'd like to ask your special permission to use/modify AutoStepper for a hackathon project 🙂 Of course, you would still retain the license and copyright to all the code you've written.

I plan to use AutoStepper and youtube-dl to make it easy to generate StepMania *.sm files. It's a fun mini-project for me and some friends, but I would like open source the project afterwards, to contribute back to the StepMania community. Would I have your permission to do this?

Please let me know if you have any more questions about the project!

All the best,

Jamie

[phr00t]

That link makes much more sense! I'm up for relicensing, but I want to retain the "pillars" of the current license: sharing alike (e.g. opensource), non-commercial & providing attribution.

I don't see why you would need special permission for your hackathon project... is what you plan to do not covered by the existing license? It sounds like a cool project & you should be free to do under the current license, if I'm not mistaken.

[JamieMagee]

Pretty much all open source licenses require sharing alike and providing attribution, but I'm not sure about the non-commercial aspect. The Open Source Initiative has an FAQ about it here: https://opensource.org/faq#profit

About needing your permission with the current license, it's because without I can't open source our project afterwards. The CC license requires us to distribute under the same license, but I would need to use a license designed for software instead. We also wouldn't be able to use any other open source software in our project since the two different types of license are incompatible.

If you're not willing to relicense, please could you grant us an exemption from the license, provided we agree to open source our project under an open source software license afterwards?

[phr00t]

I couldn't find a license readily available that restricted commercial use, so I modified the MIT license to restrict commercial use & require attribution. See https://github.com/phr00t/AutoStepper/blob/master/README.md for the new license.

[JamieMagee]

Thanks for relicensing. The MIT license is a lot easier to work with. I'll let you know what we come up with during the hackathon!