Licenses (was: Is Linuxgames still alive?)

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Dan Kegel wrote:

>Bert Peers schrieb:
            ^^^^^^^

You're using German preferences? ;)

>My company, Activision, is considering going open source
>with this library.  We haven't picked the license terms yet. 
>I'm leaning towards the Mozilla Public
>License, because the company does want to be able to
>offer an unencumbered version of the library
>to companies that can't deal with GPL / don't want to
>publish their games' sources.
>
>Bert, do you think that's the right license?

GPL surely isn't the right license for it as it requires that
almost everything coming in contact with the GPLed code has to be GPLed
too. That's usually no option for commercial game people.

BSD licensing is perhaps the freest - you can do almost anything with BSDed
code. But you might see it as drawback that it also allows that someone
takes your code, makes a proprietary product out of it and sells it.

LGPL is a mix between the above two. It requires that all changes to the
*library* (i.e. the LGPLed code) have to be LGPLed too (that's fine as you
want to see the lib evolve), but doesn't pose restrictions on the license of
apps *linked to* the lib, i.e. the library will be free (GPL-like), but the
games using it can be closed-source and purely commercial "as usual".
The LGPL however has an IMHO serious problem - I read it several times and
I still don't really understand it :(

Well, I think the MozPL is really the best for you. It's a bit more free
than the LGPL and certainly easier to understand ;)

Hope that helps

	Christian
--

if (1==1.003) printf ("Pentium detected!\n");