at least it's waaaaay more readable than proprietary ones, LOL

Just stick with the BSD license then. It´s basically about "Do whatever you want with it. And If it eats your dog, it´s not our fault. If you give it to someone else, you have to inculde this statement".

When in doubt, choose the GNU General Public License 3.0 or later

@@michaelheimbrand5424 GPL is the gold standard The BSD license is anti-FOSS, it's basically a giant sign that says "come rob us blind" (same with MIT & others of the sort)

GPL3 or greater is a good default option, so is BSD, especially if you think you might monetize it in the future

Huh, what is going on with your profile picture?

@@paulhorbenko9560 Black

-v

that's so x11

Yea

True!

Huh? I still don't get it. What I grasp is that you just give the modified source code to the original owner and no need to put it on a website downloadable to other people. Am I right?

@@noel_curray If you upstream your changes (which includes a merge), you can obviously just point to that site. But that is not what I was talking about.

@@noel_curray No. You don't need to give the modified source to the original owner. You need to give it to everyone you ever gave a binary to (if they ask).

@@Leseratte If they ask...?

"you give up all copyrights (well, as much as the law allows)" It doesn't the Bern convention basically means both that copyright is automatic, and that you can't give up your copyright even if you want to.

@` I also like short licenses, but I do admire the work that went into the CC0 to use every legal loophole to provide the greatest freedom possible. Two fallback layers, two severability clauses, it really is a fine piece of legal engineering.

dude: MacOS is into BSD family, the userland and half kernel is itself FreeBSD...BSD is "you can use but you need to quoting us"! really, MacOS IS the best example and IS the only certified Unix right now...why don't they use the BSD license? they don't want, but they can. Apple itself use Apache License for its Swift and GNU and BSD licenses for Web Kit...I ever pretty disliked GNU licenses!!! Apple is nowdays what was the Sun Microsystem....as a person could say "i don't want buy a sun workstation" nowdays you can not buy a Mac but is undoubtfully that they work is deeply helping open suorce to grow much more than Red Hat and Canonical and Android. Swift undoubtfully will be the future of coding, it is cross platform and easy and webkit is what we use for everything and right now you are using web kit...Apple is bad for many stuffs, it never gave enuff quote to FreeBSD and that's an example but her development at least is free to copy. For the close suorce neither Unix was open and surely SUn Microsystem wasn't open suorce.

If it's not too much to ask I have a question. I'm starting to develop a game while learning the ropes. It might be sellable if I finish it, but I care more about making it open-source and protect authorship. I understand that likely nobody will be interested anyway, but I would consider figuring out the licensing a part of the process of learning the ropes. I understand that third-party graphic and sound assets, if I buy some, probably will be covered under creative commons, but I'm not sure how to choose a license for my own work. Since you obviously have more experience with that, maybe you can suggest, what I could use? From what I understood it would be GPLv3, but I'm not sure if it allows for usage of base engine protected under MIT.

​@@L1vv4n I'm no lawyer or professional when it comes to licensing, but here's my two cents: When it comes to purchased assets, it's possible they are NOT an open license. They could be licensed to you, but disallow sub-licensing. You could still use these assets in an open source project if they were turned into their own separate blob of sorts. Sort of like how Quake and it's assets are separated (open source code, with map data being 'sold separately'). When it comes to your own projects where you own 100% of everything, I think you'll want to separate your project into two licenses, one for your assets (which can be a CC license) and one for your code (could be a GPL or MIT license). As long as it's clear what's licensed under what and if both allow for the freedoms you want for your project and for others. There's an element of license compatibility where some licenses don't play nice with others, but sometimes being clever with how you split up and package your software can be all the difference! Of course, it's always important to do your own spesific research too! :) TL;DR - Separate license for assets and code - Check license compatibility with other licenses - Do your own research, as it depends on what freedoms you want to give. Personally I use: Code: GPLv3 Assets: CC BY-SA 4.0 Various sources and information: creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses choosealicense.com/ blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 (used by oh-my-git) This person was suggested to just use GPLv3 for both the software and the art assets. (check for more info) softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/297102/licensing-for-artistic-work-used-inside-gplv3-licensed-software A nifty reddit post with nifty opinions. www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19h2ke/why_not_to_use_creative_commons/

@@elatronion Thanks for the detailed answer!

Thanks :)

I always drop the like early on and remove it if I don’t like the vid, but on this I almost removed it after clicking it again to like it TWICE!

What freedom have you lost (as a user) with the BSD?

@@scottfranco1962 Under the BSD license you can make your code proprietary, which won't guarantee that the user's freedom will be honored in that code. Not to mention you won't be able to tell if that's true or not since you can't review it, but the same goes to the other licenses that allow free and opensource code to be made into proprietary (or at least the changes).

@@kaalsemulzii1920 Its impossible to make the code proprietary by a third party. The code was published (and publishing is an important part of it). If the "proprietary" party wants to make it proprietary, they can certainly do that with their modifications, or even change it all around. But they would "own" only the changes they made. The original source code cannot be made proprietary, and it is always available (as long as, again, it was published in the first place). Patents are a different issue (and I am against software patents absolutely). But for copyright law this holds true. As a publisher under the BSD licence, the "disadvantage" certainly is that people don't feel the need to advise me of bugs they encountered, or their fixes. But that isn't their being proprietary, just not being very grateful to getting the source code for free in the first place. I have had people take and change my work around, then publish it. I'm fine with that. I had one author publish an add on that I found useful, but he had changed my original work to make his add on work. I asked him to change his work to be compatible with mine, and he told me he was satisfied with it and didn't want to work on it further. I liked the idea of what he did but not the implementation. So I wrote my own. Nobody was put out by that arrangement. Do I find my work around the internet? You betcha. In one case it was published in a magazine article. They never told me, I found it on my own (I personally always send a thank you note to people whose software I use). It was a great article. I recently found a package I like published by an author in CERN. They said they used it to find the Higgs boson. I sent a thank you note to the authors and offered to send them the improvements I made. Now lets contrast that with the LGPL. FIrst of all, I have no issue with others licences. If a software author says you have to stand on one foot and sing "hari Krishna" while using their software, then I say do it or don't use the software. They wrote it, they have the rights. The great thing about GNU is I have access to everything. If I have a serious issue interfacing to a LGPLed package, I have all their source. Its great. I can even compile their module and debug their software and mine together. Everything I do is BSD licenced. That means, since I provide the source of my code, according to the LGPL (and GPL) I can combine them any way I like. However, if I see a package that solves my needs (like the CERN software) that is licenced with BSD, MIT or similar licenced, I will use that instead. Why? Simple. I have no issue with a company taking my software and incorporating it into a product. However, building my software with dependencies on GPLed or even LGPLed code means my company oriented users cannot use my code, either. I basically inherit the GPL licence by association. This would mean that I would try to make the linkage to the GPL package modular, so my users can replace it, or gain the advantage of the LGPL. However, I have never done that (to date) simply because alternative licences now are widespread, and my of my users I suspect are of a like mind with me. I can usually find a low restriction licence package that will do the job. Examples are the OpenSSL package (great package BTW), and recently the company I work for chose the MBEDTLS package, also free for commercial use, because it has an ARM implementation. And the work I am doing for them is being published under a BSD type license as well (as is most of what they make). So why do I make open source software at all? Well actually I have always written software on the side. Its how I learned to program. I do it for fun, to solve issues I want solved, and to write software no company would allow me to program. For example I write compilers and operating systems for fun. Try and find THAT job description out there (it exists, but it is rare, and usually it is for GCC/LLVM specialists - I like my own code better). I should end by emphasizing the above point "as long as you have published your software". There used to be a lot of fights over software that boiled down to "you can't PROVE when you owned/published the software". Xwindows itself was such a fight (the backing store patent with AT&T - although, again, that was a patent fight). Nowadays you have AMAZING resources to publish code. I put my code on two different GIT servers, Github and Sourceforge. They will essentially stay there forever, and they have running audit trails with them. When the code was first published. Notes for each change that was committed. If someone tries to sue me for copyright or patent violations, all of the proof is there online and documented. Thus I would say to anyone considering publishing your software under a free licence, do it early and do it often. open source software is, indeed different than proprietary software. It wants and NEEDS to be seen.

@@scottfranco1962 Ok, thanks for the explanation. But can those changes contain code that would effect my privacy in any waa as a user? Also, what about DRM? Does the BSD license allow it, or even talk about it? (Honestly I just want to be informed on the matter.)

@Fashinqu A. I assume the program was functional before it fell out of maintenance. I further assume that "it cannot work" means that it cannot work with new versions of the OS? Other packages? Not sure why the situation is any different with the GPL or similar. You can't force people to work on your project, especially if you won't. If the software is/was popular, people will step up and fix it. If not, then the software is dead.

Software patents are not a thing in a lot of places so I wonder how relevant that is

@@fgsaramago Arguably the US market is pretty significant.

Weeeell, probably not. While I am not a lawyer, i found an article a little while back while researching a licence drama within our open source community, which stated that licences are not contracts, they are not two-way binding agreements, a quid-pro-quo. You can set terms within a licence, of course, but those terms merely set out how people can use, modify, [re]distribute your work without committing copyright infringement... and that's it. If you are right about those patent terms within React's licence then theoretically Facebook could take a company to court for copyright infringement if they refuse to share their patents, but it would be up to the judge to decide, and more than likely Facebook would just get a damages payout instead of getting ownership or even access to those patents.

Ive been just scrolling through their page not a single thumbnail with "linux experiment" screenshot

GPL v2 is far better

The term "Open Source" was coined in 1998 to bury the ethical aspects of Free Software and only present practical values.

The term "Open Source" was coined in 1998 to bury the ethical aspects of Free Software and only present practical values.

I don't have a problem with copyleft in general, but GPL's requirement to distribute dependency source code can get messy with package managers (as in npm, pip, etc.). I guess rust handles this best because it compiles packages from source anyways so vendoring source code is a thing.

Exactly!

I think that'd be a video on it's own.

Yes, but it makes no sense at all. A lot of drivers are dual GPL/BSD. What does that mean? The BSD restrictions are much lower than GPL. It basically negates the GPL.

@@scottfranco1962 You just choose one license. If the GPL in example is not possible, then you can use the other licensed publication. That is in example how some Steam games or applications can be released. They are normally licensed as GPL and that is not compatible with the Steamworks proprietary blob, if they want make use of it. That's just one example when dual licensing can be useful. I think this dual licensing is usually achieved by releasing the code two times with the different licenses. I never dive in into this materia too much, but that is basically how it works.

@@thingsiplay This can be difficult because you also have to handle who owns the copyright of the code. By default in all of these licenses, the author of that line of code owns the copyright for that code and can refuse to allow it be distributed under the proprietary license. This is a reason Contributor License Agreements have come along which assign the copyright to the maintainer of the repository instead.

@@flagrama That is true and often a problem if this was not handled from the beginning. In example RetroArch has to handle each of its cores (plugins to use the emulators) individually, because every single of them have its own licenses. They needed to contact everyone before they could add it to Steam, with the proprietary Steamworks blob integrated. Contributor License Agreements is a different story. They take the code and can do whatever they want. The contributor has no rights and basically gives the code to them. It has its own problems, but can solve some issues.

Creative Commons was NOT made for software, and software licenses were NOT made for content.

@@JoaoPedro-ki7ct same idea,pretty restrictive for an open licence.

GPL is great for standalone applications imo, but absolutely catastrophic as a library licence... and people will just ignore it... look at Bukkit for example. Bukkit is GPLv3 but you wouldn't know it given how seemingly most Bukkit plugins out there are closed source or permissively open sourced, which then creates its own linking problems, because who's going to check the licences of the dependences of their dependencies? GPL libraries are a copyright explosion waiting to happen, indeed Bukkit has already had a massive copyright drama _thanks to GPLv3._ As Felix Reda said in their "Julia Reda: Correcting copywrongs" talk in 2014: _"The only reason the [copyright] system hasn't collapsed is that the vast majority creators actually don't enforce their rights."_

@John Smith The problem with 'no derivatives' is that translations are considered derivatives meaning that no one is allowed to translate your work to other languages.

Well done, its also the only one that isn't selfish!

@@epsi well depends on which version, I think the 4th clause version of BSD is no good at all. However, the others? I agree, they're great👍

Why?

I'd say so!

That makes no sense. If it is licensed under the GPL, you can use it on your work no problem. The same for the LGPL and the MIT.

​@@softwarelivre2389 The whoooole point of GPL is to coerce any and all projects it touches into also being GPL. Google _could've_ used his projects just fine, the problem is that they didn't want their projects to also become GPL.

@@lodgin that point applies is when you have derived work, but if you're just using the tool, the GPL is the license that better protects the end user's rights.

@@softwarelivre2389 Not true, read the bottom of the GPLv3 licence text.

Did you... already watch it?

​@@AR15ORIGINAL Yes, markers make it easier and faster to watch.

Nice!

(... although now I think about it, the *real* bon mot in this context would be the *non*-false-friend en{comprehensible}

You were 4 seconds too late to be the first!

WTFPL does not include warranty protections. Therefore people can sue you if they mess things up while using your software.

​@@Cuperino well, you could simply add the no warranty as the WTFPL website says, and that will make it safe :P no need to copy the license into each source file, like imagine how much KBs you save if you have a large software. xD

@@Cuperino it says "do what you want".. you did want to mess things up, and you were permitted. Nobody said "does what you want"...

As much of a good intention the author of WTFPL had, it's not a real license.

GPL?

What is special about Cecill?