All,

I've noticed we're starting to collate quite a large number of tools now, as well as preview releases, which is absolutely great.

I'm wondering if we should perhaps consider at this point formalising the licences under which these various projects are being released. Without explicitly stating what can and can't be done with the programs, it's hard to complain about how they're (mis)-used later.

Authors have every right to license their own work however they want, but I think it would be good if we could have a single line on the Development Tools / Retro WIP pages with a title or description of the licence against each project, and possibly further information/links on the individual project pages.

Licences can be as simple as stating it's in the Public Domain (do whatever you want with it), or you can write your own (though that might result in legal loopholes). There are also specific licences which have been written by legal professionals to allow certain rights and restrict others. I've put links to four popular open source licences below, which range from being quite restrictive to very permissive.

Note: I'm *not* pushing to open source anything here - these are just the only licences I'm pretty familiar with - there are plenty of others out there. There's nothing wrong with just a simple statement, such as saying whether the releases are binary-only and also whether they are public domain or free for non-commercial use etc.

I just think we've got a lot of hard work going on here, and I think we should be clear how we want to allow people to make use of it so there's no confusion later. I'd strongly recommend taking some time to look at all the licensing options, and avoid making a rash decision. Once something has been published under GPL, say, it can't be taken back (tho future versions of the code can be re-licenced).

I have no intentions of pushing my own preferred licensing views on everyone, but hopefully, you can see why I think we should be explicit on just what people can and can't expect to do with the stuff being produced.

Thoughts?

Sam.

Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported Licence (BY-NC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses
- Free for non-commercial use, must credit original author. Source code may or may not be supplied.

GNU GPLv3 License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
- Requires source code to be distributed with binaries and all derivatives or modifications must also be released as GPL.

GNU LGPLv3 License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser ... ic_License
- As above, but intended for software libraries - an LGPL work can be used by a program with a different free or proprietary, even non-(L)GPLed, license.

3-clause BSD License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license
- Only requires the copyright notice/disclaimer to be reproduced. Commercial, proprietary and binary-only derivatives are all permitted.

Any software I produce (with one or two exceptions) is what I class as copyrighted freeware and can be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Coolios. Any objections to putting a statement to that effect on the Development Tools/Retro WIP pages, then?

Sam.

No probs.

Kind regards,

Francis.

I need to check out the licenses but whichever is not open source but permits commercial or none commercial use would be about right, with possible permission request if someone wants to distribute it. i.e. so we can control which versions are readily available, although not sure if that's important. Obviously copyright still resides with the author.

@Francis

I've taken the liberty of marking your projects as freeware - obviously, just edit the wiki if any of the exceptions you mentioned are hosted on this site.

@SteveO

I would say from your description that you should mark your projects as Freeware like Francis, or perhaps use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (BY). That is, until you mentioned the distriibution restriction clause. I don't know of any licences that specifically have that kind of exclusion, so you might have to settle for writing something to that effect yourself, if you do want to withhold that right.

I've put TBC's on the Retro WIP / Development Tools pages and the individual project pages, for the software licences.

Would appreciate it if everyone could fill in something for each of their projects.

Sam.

Had a quick look at the freeware license, seems exactly right for me. I've updated the Wiki page for Swift. Thanks for researching this Peter.

That fine.

Kind regards,

Francis.

@SteveO

Just to clarify - there is no explicit licence associated with the term Freeware (unlike Creative Commons, GPL etc., which you could hope to use in a court of law). The Wikipedia article has one view, but the term has been around for a long time so different people may well have a different interpretation of exactly what it means.

So long as we have something recognisable to your average user on the site, I'm happy with it ... but I wouldn't confuse it with an actual legal licence agreement, which will have been designed to provide proper legal protection.

As you guys aren't releasing source code atm, it probably doesn't matter that the term freeware is a bit vague ... tho, it is worth noting that you need to add any other restrictions (like it says at the bottom of the Wikipedia article) like non-profit, for example, if you want to stop people being allowed to re-sell the software.

Sam.

I think I would go for GNU GPLv3 License and I would agree with Steve about a clause about getting permission in order to control versions that are around.

Mark,

I don't think you can add a clause to the GPL like that and I don't know of any other licenses that cover that specifically. Do you want to just mark yours as "Freeware but No Distribution"? If so, and it's highly unlikely this will ever come up!, do you mind if it was used commercially? e.g. if someone took your game, ported it to say a mobile phone and then sold it for profit? If you do, then maybe that should expand to be "Free for non-commercial use but No Distribution". Will one of those do?

Also as I've mentioned before, marking it with a sentence like this is clear enough to most ppl but "Freeware" means different things to different ppl and obviously a sentence like the one above doesn't afford the same legal protection as a proper licence.

Sam.

I think I'll take the GNU GPLv3 License then, seems to fit the best.

Duly added to the wiki pages!

Sam.