Oolite Bulletins

I've never had to really think about this, but does anyone know if Oolite conforms to the full Open Source definition found here? I'm pretty sure it does, but if I'm missing something it would be handy to know.

Is Oolite fully OSS? If it isn't, I'll eat my sombrero!


You mean the core game/source code, yes?

Cody wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:02 pm

You mean the core game/source code, yes?

Yes, only the core game.

Just to mention the copyright issues with this: Steam-ready (almost)

All of the Oolite core is available under the GPL version 2 or later (which is an OSD-compatible license), so to the headline question, yes. Oolite was included in Debian main (which requires that) for many years.

Assets (models, textures, etc.) are *additionally* available under CC-BY-SA-NC 3.0. This is *not* an OSD-compatible license, because of the "Non-Commercial" restriction, so if you wanted an OSD-compatible distribution you would need to use the GPL option for those files too. That's there because a lot of OXPs have typically picked CC-BY-SA-NC licenses for their own distribution, and this dual-licensing means that there's no problem with authors including derivatives of core Oolite assets in their OXPs.

There are also some bits (see the LICENSE file) under their own BSD-style licensing. These are also OSD-compatible licenses, and they're GPL-compatible licenses, so don't affect the work as a whole being distributed under GPL v2+.