Licensing Options

[Nick]

I have never worried about licenses on my work. None of them have been worth stealing nor have I been trying to make money.

Just so I know where to start, what licenses should I get for:

1) Game entry into 21DL or uDG contests?
2) Freeware game on website (not open source)?
3) Shareware game on website?
4) Full blown boxed game (not published by anyone; just sold from my website in boxes and mailed.)?

Thanks for all the help.

[Malarkey]

I usually release anything that requires me to use a license under the MIT license (like I did for the "Accelerated" contest). For freeware/shareware stuff that's not open-source, I just declare the project as whatever when I release it to the public, add some legalese about me not being liable if it fries your computer or whatever (basically the last half of the MIT license), and note that the entire thing is copyrighted by me (where applicable, of course).

[phydeaux]

For (1): You only really need to worry about what license you want if your code is open-source, because it just depends how generous you want to be. This is a huge debate in itself.

For (2,3,4) anything not open-source you will probably want the same standard software license everyone uses that usually offers these main things:

A. User cannot copy, reverse-engineer, or sell derivative works of the software
B. User can get a refund if you send him defective media
C. You are not liable if software fries User's computer (most of the open-source licenses have this provision as well.)

Here's an example of such a license. (http://www.cisco.com/public/sw-license-agreement.html) Replace your name with Cisco and voila. I imagine there's probably a place you can find a template where you can put in your company and get a license like this, which is not a bad idea to include if you are putting out a closed-source product.

[Dan Potter]

For the 30 second intro to free software / open source licenses:

- If you don't care what anyone does with it, use MIT/X11 or BSD. For the latter, make sure you get the 3-clause version, not the one with the advertising clause in it. MIT/X11 is simpler for new code.

- If you don't care about people using your code in their proprietary project but you don't want your code itself (and derivatives) to become proprietary, use the LGPL.

- If you want your code and any code linked to it / derived from it to remain free, use the GPL.

Pretty much all of the rest of the licenses were special cases that companies came up with because their lawyers weren't happy enough with some aspect of one of those. :) Most of those companies end up going back and dual-licensing under the GPL in the long run anyway.