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yiotro / Antiyoy

A source code of android game called 'antiyoy'.
421 stars 53 forks source link

What is the license for this project? #83

Open lgommans opened 4 years ago

lgommans commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the great game! It's even better knowing that it's actually open source :D. You really did a splendid job here.

One question I have is what the license is for the code and assets. If no license is given, then the standard copyright law applies and nobody can do anything with your code other than read it (no forks, no re-use of any assets or code snippets... at least not legally).

Would you consider adding a license to the project?

Kagetoki-Kariya commented 4 years ago

I know about open source code, but which project? :P

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 12:47 AM Luc Gommans notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks for the great game! It's even better knowing that it's actually open source :D. You really did a splendid job here.

One question I have is what the license is for the code and assets. If no license is given, then the standard copyright law applies and nobody can do anything with your code other than read it (no forks, no re-use of any assets or code snippets... at least not legally).

Would you consider adding a license to the project?

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yiotro commented 4 years ago

Yes, it has standard copyright law. I'm actually ok with people using my code to make their own free versions of the game but I can't find suitable license for that. All major open source licenses allow commercial use, which I don't like.

lgommans commented 4 years ago

Sorry for the late response, I looked around and I think this might be the best place to look because of the non-commercial license option (noncommercial "open" licenses are a bit controversial, but Creative Commons made it work):

https://creativecommons.org/choose/

Filling out your requirements results in this license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (not sure whether you'd want to add the share-alike part).

Frankly I doubt that people would straight up clone the game in an unethical manner: if they have such intentions they probably wouldn't care about a license. It's more about allowing others to take pieces that may be useful to them so they don't have to reinvent the wheel, or perhaps use an asset they really like in return for linking your game from their project. Or to include the game in another software store (for example Debian can't just take a copy of your game, it's copyrighted, but if you add a permissive license then they would legally be able to include it in their software repository for people to conveniently install with apt). That's why I think a license can be helpful :)

Thinking about it some more, I just realized that GPL might be more of an option than I realized while looking for suitable licenses: it's widely considered not an option for commercial projects because anyone who obtains a copy of the compiled version has a legal right to obtain a copy of the source code as well. Someone could ask money for it, but the first customer can also get the source code and legally distribute that to anyone they like.

Hope this helped, even if this does leave you with two options rather than a clear best choice.

yiotro commented 4 years ago

Thanks, I'll look into it.