[SOLVED] I need help with liscense.

[ChristienChapman]

It's tax season folks. Okay just kidding... I don't need help filing taxes but I do need help making a license thing. I am not really into licenses. I really don't care if people steal the code used in the program or not, I just would like for everyone to use for free and for whatever purpose they will. I have a rough draft of a license. Is this applicable for a ContentDB mod?

Copyright (C) Jim B. Rosemont Harves. 2022.


This program and the contents therein are released to the public as-is and in the public domain under LGPL-1.2.

You may use all code, music, sounds, and textures without the express consent of the creator of this mod and can do so for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

You may host our content and edit it any way you wish.

The licenses included from other programs are available within their respective folders.

[Blockhead]

Recap: A copyright holder chooses a license to give others the right to use their work, but also to protect themselves legally from what happens if people use that work and it has some kind of 'implied warranty'. Minetest as a community prefers and strongly encourages free software and free culture licenses. And licenses are really complicated, some lawyers are experts just in licenses...

According to your wording "I really don't care if people steal the code used in the program and use it for whatever purpose they will" well.. let's go over your actual options first. You have to ask yourself whether you want to enforce the requirement for others to "share alike" or whether they can take the code and close it off:

• The GNU LGPL is complicated. It used to be known as the GNU Library General Public License. I would say it is not really appropriate for Minetest mods because those are all Lua, whereas the LGPL is targeted at compiled software. Choose the normal GNU General Public License if you want to require others to "share alike", where if they provide others with a copy of the mod, the receivers are also obligated to respect the same freedoms to reuse the code, redistribute it, even for a cost, etc. from your mod.
• Given your wording, you may prefer a permissive license like the MIT license instead of a copyleft one like LGPL. The MIT license basically only requires people attribute you when they reuse your work and has a standard warranty disclaimer.
• You shouldn't confuse either license for "public domain" either. Public domain actually means you are releasing all copyright, and anybody can use it for any purpose, even without giving credit.

We're not done with licenses yet :) You should understand the licenses like MIT and GPL were written for programs and code, and their wording is not really suitable for media like your textures, sounds and models (where those are you original work). Minetest maps would also fit under the umbrella of 'media' here. Creative Commons Licenses are popular for distributing media. CC-BY-SA-3.0 or 4.0 is most popular around here. Licensing your media separately from your code helps people reuse it.

Finally with licensing: Be careful about where you got your source code and media from, remember it properly because you need to obey its license. It's ok if you got some media under a different license than whatever you choose, as long as the license everything is under is kept clear. If it came from someone on the forums then I think you can safely use that with attribution (by crediting them) because that's what you said you would do when you asked.

After you choose licenses for your works, and establish what license you may have received other works under, you have to write the copyright & license statements.

In a copyright statement the wording is usually like so:
Copyright (C) <copyright-years> <author name>

which can be followed simply by a license statement like:
licensed under the <license-name>

in your instance that's something like
Copyright (C) 2022 Jim B. Rosemont Harves. Licensed under the MIT License.

and for licensing code and media separately I would write at least two statements, something like:

Code Copyright (C) 2022 Jim B. Rosemont Harves. Licensed under the MIT License.
Textures, models and sounds Copyright (C) 2022 Jim B. Rosemont Harves. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

and of course add all the credits you have told people will be added to your project from your posts here on the forum - or elsewhere :)

Many people do include the full license text and that might be wisest but a simple license statement is usually enough to get away with it (the other end of the spectrum is having the full text of every license plus keeping a file that lists the author(s) and license on every file in the whole project).

Summary: Choose MIT/GPL License for code + CC-BY-SA-4.0 + credit other contributors from forums/elsewhere.

[ChristienChapman]

Okay thanks I will gove you credit for liscensing.