Comment by heyadayo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heyadayo | Hacker News Reader

Michael Carter here from Game Closure, I'd like to clear up some of the licensing questions.

For background, before GC I founded a non-profit that helped open source projects deal with licensing issues, CLAs, and IP around software in general. I've been involved in 3-4 large OSS projects, and I've spoken at OSCON and Pycon multiple times. I very strongly believe in the GPL, though we also wanted to let businesses use GC DevKit for commercial use under the most friendly possible terms.

Our goal is to promote GC DevKit and ensure that 3rd party bugfixes on the commercial and GPL licenses both end up in the same code base.

(1) You can use this under the GPL, no strings attached. (2) We wanted to further allow you to create commercial products, so we ADDITIONALLY offer an incredibly developer-friendly license (GCFL)

* You can release paid games on iOS or android (Note below, we should add web at some point)

* You don't pay us money, it's FREE.

* If you improve the engine, you must contribute it back to our main GPL version.

* You need to show our splash screen and let us mention your game to promote our platform.

Also, yes, we probably should allow web games under the GCFL (But you can still do it with the GPL.) We just haven't made Desktop Web a priority so we disallowed it in the license. This could easily change if enough people are interested.

The GPL is a hard sell to anyone. But with your commercial license, where do you draw the line between building functionality for your game on top of an engine versus extending the engine? It seems fuzzy. Besides, not having an option to build a game without either making it open source or publicly evangelizing your product will make adoption a non-starter for many serious developers.

Licensing aside, it seems strange to build a platform on HTML5/Javascript without support for the desktop/web. To me, that would be the whole point of building a game in HTML5 in the first place.

Other than all those caveats, it's nice to see more alternatives to ImpactJS beginning to emerge.

I get your concern about supporting the web; I think it's because a lot of people really want us to be a web game engine, but we aren't. We're a mobile game engine. We simply chose "HTML5" as an API layer because of the excellent tooling around the ecosystem. It just so happens we support the web as a side-product, and that's pretty cool I think, but not really the point of the GC DevKit.

Great feedback on the fuzziness of the license WRT contributions! Overall our intention is to let people keep their source code proprietary, but protect clear bug fixes and enhancements to the core engine. We never, ever intend to come up with some "gotcha" and start charging money. Any suggestions on changes or clarifications to our license that let us accomplish that are very welcome! (Though please read our first attempt in Exhibit A "Modifications" first)

The good news is that the core native engine (c/c++/java/obj-c) is very obviously separated from the game code and so that's easy; it's just the JS libraries that we have to be precise about. Perhaps the MPL has the right wording and guidelines around that?

("The MPL is a simple, file-level copyleft license. The MPL’s “weak” copyleft is designed to encourage contributors to share modifications they make to your code, while still allowing them to combine your code with code under other licenses (open or proprietary) with minimal restrictions.")

But games are all different. An improvement to the engine for one kind of game may not be an improvement for another kind of game. Most games would probably only use a small part of the engine.

Will the engine become a monolith with support for pretty much everything, and all games using the engine will only need 10% of it? Or something else?

I think you need to state very clearly what the goal of the engine is (best 2d engine, best tile game engine, best ??? engine, general purpose engine, etc?), which can help define exactly what kinds of contributions are actually useful.

>But games are all different. An improvement to the engine for one kind of game may not be an improvement for another kind of game. Most games would probably only use a small part of the engine.

I don't really see them as all different. Especially at the engine level. Especially considering most 2D engines (Cocos, Game Closure, etc) are mostly the same and use similar concepts.

* You need to show our splash screen and let us mention your game to promote our platform.

I understand that, but you maybe you should consider charging some money to get the splash screen removed ? else its a deal breaker indeed.

I'd try it out especially since I am having some hard time with cocoonjs (making it work in android and some features failing to work in ios5).

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