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[REQUEST] Add a (real) LICENSE #185

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Soundtoxin opened this issue Sep 17, 2023 · 5 comments
Open

[REQUEST] Add a (real) LICENSE #185

Soundtoxin opened this issue Sep 17, 2023 · 5 comments
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enhancement New feature or request

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@Soundtoxin
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https://choosealicense.com/

Currently you just have:

You may use this to make mods, but your mods must be released for free.

Perhaps you'd like a copyleft license.

@Soundtoxin Soundtoxin added the enhancement New feature or request label Sep 17, 2023
@HiGuyMB
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HiGuyMB commented Sep 26, 2023

Problem with this is that a majority of the code in this repo is from Torque Shader Engine, which is not open source. So any choice of a license other than "all rights reserved" would be misleading. A real solution would be to port the source to the MIT version of Torque3D, but that would take significant effort.

@NeoTheLynx
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Alot of the MBU specific stuff won't work on T3D without major rewrites of that codebase, not to mention performance would have to be fixed too.

@Soundtoxin
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Interesting. The situation is a bit more grim and complicated than I'd realized then. Between the name and the claim of being "open source" on the site, I got the wrong idea. For the record, "open source" has an actual legal definition and is not the same as "visible source" or "public source" (so you can't just slap some stuff on GitHub and say it's open source if you don't own the copyright to that code or if that code is not already licensed open source), it's defined by the OSI and determined by the license used. So this project is not really open source at all.

Here is a bit of reading on the topic if you're interested.

https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/01/Open-source-is-defined-by-the-OSD.html
https://drewdevault.com/2022/09/16/Open-source-matters.html
https://drewdevault.com/2018/10/30/Its-not-okay-to-pretend-youre-open-source.html

If your ultimate goal is to remove all the proprietary source code and become a fully open source project, that is awesome and I support that, but I think it could be made more clear. Apologies if any of this comes off as hostile, that's not my intention. You're right that in the current case you can't exactly just license the whole repo.
I guess worst case, the copyright to the problematic portions will expire in 100 years or so and our grandkids can do whatever they want with it.

@NeoTheLynx
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It would be nice to have everything using open code, the current plan is to match the 360 version 100%, and then look into trying to possibly bring it to a new engine after that

@HiGuyMB
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HiGuyMB commented Sep 26, 2023

Don't worry about being opinionated @Soundtoxin. I have ranted about this at length to the maintainers :)

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