[Ohrrpgce] Re-licensing plans

[Ralph Versteegen]

Originally I was going to poll contributors about what sort of license they
wanted, but it required including heaps of information which is why I never
finished that email. Better to decide now and see whether anyone objects.

Yes, the main difference between MIT and zlib is that MIT requires an
attribution notice be "included" with the software, although it doesn't
specify what "included" means, and people disagree on it, which is
something I don't like about it. Some interpret it as "preservation" of
notices whereever they exist (e.g. source code). For example the Godot devs
are very relaxed and openly suggest putting it someplace users can't see.

I do like the idea of at least requiring attribution though, and I'm still
on the fence about requiring people to release changes/improvements they
make to the code (weak copyleft) because without these the games become
orphaned.
On the other hand there's a lot of utility code in our codebase which I'd
like to be able to give away for use without the annoyance of a notice.
Maybe we can simply declare various modules public domain. I've already
done this in a number of files. It doesn't really work so well if code
might get moved between modules in future unless contributors preemptively
allow it.

Early this year when I apparently wasn't working on the OHR I was actually
spending a lot of time looking into potential script interpreters to embed
and starting on that. That's a whole 'nother story, but one thing I noticed
was that with just one exception, they all used the MIT license, so we're
going to have lots of MIT licensed code anyway. Godot and many other modern
free software game engines also use MIT.
Including copyright notices these days is common, for example Switch
provides an "Intellectual Property Notices" screen outside of the game for
them.

If someone did insist on a copyleft license there is a very good option:
the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, which is weak copyleft and would be no
impediment to linking to closed libraries or distributing on closed
systems. It requires you release the source for your modifications (to
existing source files) but not your additions (of new files) and doesn't
even require notices except somewhere a link to the source.


On Fri, 22 Oct 2021 at 09:30, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

> I'm getting ready to start sending individual mail to each contributor to
> talk about the relicensing plans, and to start collecting written consents
> (Ralph, I'll CC you when I do.)
>
> https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Contributors/Relicensing
>
> Before I start, I wanted to make sure we agree what new license we prefer.
> I know we had discussed Zlib and MIT
>
> I think you said you preferred MIT, just because it requires the copyright
> notice to be retained in forks. That sounds good to me also. I think the
> only reason to pick zlib was that SDL2 uses it, which doesn't really make a
> difference one way or the other.
>
> ---
> James Paige
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>
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