I’ve started the CGF some years ago to learn Godot and to provide something to the community. I even made a few FOSS games with it.
Sadly my work with my other FOSS projects and the fediverse doesn’t give me enough time to keep it up to date and to migrate it to Godot 4 and since the engine is picking up a ton of speed, I think it’s a shame people have to keep rediscovering the card game wheel.
I know a lot of people avoid it due to the AGPL3 license, so I am thinking of switching to an MIT license instead in the hopes that others will help carry the torch until I find time to circle back to it. There’s always pitfalls with MIT of course, such as some company trying to enclose it and sell it as a service, but perhaps peer pressure would be enough of a deterrent at this time.
Anyway. Just opening this up for discussion.
I love the GPL and AGPL, but for all intents and purposes, MIT makes more sense for a game development setting. You don’t want people to realize too pate that your plugin is GPL so they now have to rup it out and make their own, so they don’t have to open source their project…
I can tell you that I wouldn’t invest my time in developing a game if there’s no chance of selling it in the first place due to the license requirements of a third party package.
Well AGPL doesn’t prevent selling, but most people think it will steal their sales, which I don’t think it’s true.
agpl does not “steal” sales, but i have to give my users the source code under a gpl compatible license, that includes that they redistirbute the code however they see fit.
that scares many people, but i guess they forget that your game is more than code and the license does not cover assets
MIT may attract more people… but why would that be people who would contribute back in the direct you want? I’ve seen many MIT extentions for Godot, maybe they would have some insight.
Most indie devs make their MIT Godot games proprietary and I doubt peer pressure has ever stopped companies from taking MIT work and making it proprietary before. If software freedom of your users is important then the copyleft aspect is an important way to protect their freedom. Imo, not worth losing that on the off-chance it all goes well.
Those same hypothetical users who take MIT code and don’t contribute back, likely wouldn’t bother using (A)GPL code anyway, so either way they’re not contributing.
Is there much harm in having MIT licensees who don’t contribute?
There are many companies that violate the GPL by not sharing their modified code on redistribution. Eventually they comply on request or lawsuit (in thanks to the Software Freedom Conservancy). It’s not the contribution OP is after (direct project interaction) but I consider getting access to their changes to be °giving back to the community°.
If it’s one dude not contributing back I ain’t that worrried but if it’s a big company then that ain’t good. It’s doing free work which could have been paid for (if not to yourself then to someone else doing the work for pay). Also, I value software freedom so I consider proprietary software to be harmful in of itself.
Fair dos. In general I’m in the camp that proprietary software using open software isn’t as bad as them using exclusively proprietary code, but enforcing has always been pretty hard so I’ve never been one to complain when people do libre-forks of stuff.
That being said, I did see post a while back that was a great example of what’s possible under the best case scenario!
A notable part of Evan Boehs getting Truth Social to be AGPL complaint is that they are not the copyright holder, which gives a lot of hope. An “end user” suing for compliance hasn’t been concluded in court yet (there is one in process SFC vs [edit] Vizio). If that succeeds then perhaps getting compliance will be easier in the future!
Sadly getting compliance also includes them just engineering the non-compliant code out - so they enjoy the use of free software for some time without ever giving back.
