Sunday, January 31, 2010

Magecrawl changes license, now new BSD license'ed

Magecrawl is being relicensed under the new BSD license (3-clause). As the sole copyright holder of the source code, (the other person who helped at the very beginning both assigned me copyright and is cool with the change), I'm able to do this with little fuss.

The reason I did this is primarily due to my interested in MEF, which seems pretty cool and I'm interested in trying. MEF is licensed MS-PL, which is basically BSD licensed with a clause that says roughly "if we have software pattens that apply you can use them, but if you sue us, we can sue you back using them." I actually don't mind that clause in general, unfortunately the GPL isn't compatible with it since it is an additional restriction.

More generally however, the idea that the source code I wrote couldn't be combined with something arguably under fewer restrictions annoyed me. I realized that I had defaulted to GPLv3 not out of any ideological reason, but just because it seemed like a good place to start. I think the BSD license is closer to what I want, since I'm not expecting any commercial software company to eat up my code and sell it without giving me any credit. If you do happen to grab a segment of code larger than a "small chunk", letting me know and a note in the credits would be nice however. :)

Note: Technically I realized that tech demo I and II have been released without the required license text files saying libtcod, libtcod-net are both BSD and sdl is lgpl. If someone really wants to me, I'll pull them all down off the website and make fresh ones with the text files attached. I've fixed hg truck, so new released will be correct.

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