Hi, the license is a temporary choice. I wish to release it under a permissive license in the future, I'd just like to secure a tiny bit of funding before that !
Just a note that if you accept any merge from anyone else, when changing the licence, you'll have to have their consent to change the license as well. Sounds like it might be a difficult thing to switch, depending on how many contributors you'll have when wanting to switch.
Is that true though? I thought all third party contributed changes are licensed separately, with the contributor still having all rights, unless they explicitly say otherwise.
IANAL: My understanding is the same as @halfastack's.
> I thought all third party contributed changes are licensed separately, with the contributor still having all rights, unless they explicitly say otherwise.
That's true, but it prevents the project owner from changing the license unless either the contributed code's license is compatible with the new license, or all contributors consent to the license change. That is, going from MIT to GPL is fine, but GPL to MIT is not.
Projects concerned with this frequently require contributors to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) where the contributor gives permission for the project to use the contributions and relicense them in the future. E.g., Ubuntu [1].
I don't think that's quite accurate either. Although you can include MIT-licensed code in a project that is, as a whole, licensed under the GPL, you still must include the original license and copyright, rather than "going from MIT to GPL."
For example, if you have an MIT-licensed project and I contribute to it, my MIT-licensed contribution will remain MIT-licensed, regardless of what you do in the future. If you change your project license to GPLv3, and later can prove that someone used my code from your project after downloading your project's source, I do not think you will be able to successfully hold them to the GPLv3 and force them to release the source of their derivative work.
My understanding is a bit different, but also not a lawyer.
> going from MIT to GPL is fine, but GPL to MIT is not
AFAIK both are _not_ fine, eapecially because the licenses are totally incompatible.
When you publish a patch under a certain license (that of the project at the moment of the contribution), you _only_ allow using your code under that license. This is why dual licensing is a thing.
Except when you sign a CLA - mostly used by companies to gain copyright over your work. In that case the company can do whatever they want - even charge you later to use your own code.
> AFAIK both are _not_ fine, eapecially because the licenses are totally incompatible.
MIT licensed code can be relicensed under GPL with or without modification to the code. It is only the other way around that won’t work. The reason for this are the specific demands made in each license.
> The MIT license is also compatible with many copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL); MIT licensed software can be integrated into GPL software, but not the other way around
IANAL.
Personally I encourage people to prefer the ISC/BSD/MIT family of license over GPL, but anyone that is set on using a GPL license is within their rights to do so for code derviative of said licenses (and several others as listed in the above linked list of GPL compatible licenses).
License your work under GPL3 and if someone want to uses your engine in a proprietary game, then you can sell him your game engine under a permissive license. Just be sure that the other contributor are okay with it.
GPL has great provisions against hostile forks, but as is it's a bit too restrictive for games as final products.
I'd imagine that LGPL would give both an incentive to contribute to the engine, and a way to commercially release games based on it, without GPLing all the assets and all the game mechanics.
One of the most celebrated changes in SDL2 was moving from LGPL to ZLIB license. All the linking requirements of LGPL are a pain for games and distribution.
I think you meant "Lesser GPL with the static linking exception". IIRC glibc is "stock" LGPL 2.1 without any linking exception, so I may have misunderstood your comment and you mean just LGPL.
The LGPL is not viral but it has some requirements that are inconvenient when distributing a game, specially it makes static linking impossible.