Licensing OXPs

[Cholmondely]

And note that the trolls have left our community.

Calling them trolls is a little harsh. Over-derailment coupled with over-reaction was the main cause of KW's leaving.

Trying to divine KW's wishes/intentions re his OXPs ain't easy. I'll back away from that, and turn a blind eye!

If you look back to some of the other threads, you will see one or two of the same names cropping up and having other stabs at KW. The over-derailment seems (to me) to have been the last straw which broke the camel's back.

[Cody]

Oh, I've read the other threads - at the time, and more recently. Anyway, it's all effluent under the bridge now!

[Lone_Wolf]

I'm currently working on an oxp that's completely new and a 2nd that's a fork of another. That means I have to think about licensing before I publish them..

Overtime I've come to prefer copyleft licenses like the GNU Public License . Oolite itself uses GPL-2.0-or-later for everything and dual-licenses artwork also under the CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 (some special stuff has another license).

I doubt there will be artwork created by me, so GPL-2.0-or-later seems fine.
Then there's the recommendation of adding boilerplate to all files to ensure it's clear under which license they fall.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ ... rules.html# mentions using SPDX license indentifiers for boilerplate.

I intend to add a COPYING file, the GPL license text itself and put this on top of every file I create/change :

Code: Select all

# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
#

That should cover the new oxp, for the fork it will be trickier.
Do you think this approach will work ?

[phkb]

Do you think this approach will work ?

When you say "will it work", I think you mean "will it be sufficient". Given no one has been taken to court to prove any of this, it's a little hard to say. But, from the sound what you're describing, yes, it will be sufficient. My take has always been, in the absence of a manifest.plist file with a specific license mentioned, then check the readme file. If an individual text-based file doesn't explicitly mention a license, then the readme should cover it, which is particularly important for graphical assets that can't have a license embedded in them). Including a COPYING or LICENSING file would do the same, but it's not as common for OXZ's. Having license info at the top of a script file is reasonably common, but not universal, so again, it should be covered in the readme.

The idea in all of this is to declare your intent. How do you want others to use the assets in the mod? Is your intention clear *somewhere* inside the mod? If you've done that, I think you're good to go.

[Lone_Wolf]

The idea in all of this is to declare your intent. How do you want others to use the assets in the mod? Is your intention clear *somewhere* inside the mod? If you've done that, I think you're good to go.

I do intend to make that clear in readme files, thanks for the input.