I think it'd help a couple of us out if you share the pros and cons of various licensing schemes for self-publishing games, after you've done the research and worked it out.
Still working on it.
Depends what you want. If you don't expect to make any money on the thing, then I expect any ol' open-source license will do.
GPL would seem to be incompatible with the iOS App Store, since it requires that source be distributed with binaries and no restrictions be placed on copying.
Affero GPL is for what we'd call "cloud-based" software (but the FSF would like us please not to). It closes a loophole in the standard GPL that doesn't require devs to release source code for server-side apps.
And a three-clause BSD-style license can be used for pretty much any purpose; you can distributed modified versions under any license you want.
The downside of any of these licenses is that somebody else can simply recompile your code and charge money for it. Which isn't a problem if we go back to the presumption that you're not going to be making any money in the first place, but if you DO happen to start getting money it's bound to be irritating to see somebody else horn in on that without actually making any changes to your program. (In that case, GPL would at least require that if they DO modify your game, you can demand that they release the modifications. But if they don't make any changes at all, they can still redistribute the thing and charge money for it without giving you anything.)
Lugaru managed to avoid that pitfall by licensing only the engine under the GPL and retaining full control of the game resources. That's one way to go but I'm not sure I'd want to do it like that myself.
The part that's likely to be confusing if I go forward is compatibility of licenses. There's something called the LGPL which allows the integration of libraries into software that isn't published under the same license. Some devkits are published under that, which makes for more flexibility than a fully GPL, or fully proprietary, system. And there's also the question of the platform itself -- does it compile binaries, or do you need to include the devkit to actually run the software? That can introduce licensing questions. And even if it DOES produce binaries and allow them to be published under different licenses, is its own license the kind of thing that free-software devs would shy away from? There's historically been a backlash against GPL'ed software that can't be compiled without proprietary tools; on the other hand, there's a resultant history of the FSF leveraging those problems to create free alternatives. (GNOME/KDE is a result of this; KDE is built on Qt, which was originally a proprietary library; GNOME was created as a fully-free alternative; Qt is now free too.)
Anyway, at this point I've got a lot more questions than answers.
When I went to the pygame IRC channel, there were only two guys active and they said not to use pygame.
Well, that could save me some trouble, anyway; I'll definitely keep it in mind. Thanks.
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Topic: Game Developer's Wanking Corner (Read 3716 times)