Hello everyone.

I’m developing an open-source visual novel engine. And I’m struggling to choose between the two licenses: MIT and BSD 3-Clause. I wasn’t much about licenses until this moment, so I have to ask someone else. Which one should I pick and why, if someone knows?

Thank you in advance.

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    52 minutes ago

    A simple comparison between the two via interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu says that they’re almost identical save for one clause around trademarks:

    https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/licence/compare/BSD-3-Clause;MIT

    But I’d be remiss if I didn’t advocate for a license that better protected your project from corporate theft. The AGPL and GPL are excellent licenses that protect your work and that of the community from companies that would copy it, improve it exclusively for themselves and then ship your work exclusively in binary form:

    https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

    • Ars Fireside@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      1·
      8 minutes ago

      I thought of using GPL, but it would mean someone else would be obliged to open their source code if they base their software on my engine. Though open-source is good and must exist (speaking of Ren’Py, which is not GPL, but still an open-source engine considered a golden standard of VN development), I’d like to give others the right to make their derivate works either open or closed, by their choice.

      As for AGPL, I know nothing, unfortunately.

    • RmDebArc_5@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      9 minutes ago

      Wouldn’t the LGPL make more sense for an engine? Otherwise it would be hard to make a proprietary game (read almost every game) even if you publish any changes you made to the engine.

    • Ars Fireside@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Well, the only difference is a so-called “non-endorsement clause”. I wanted to know where can I use it, and if I even should.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Out of curiosity, why develop your own instead of contributing to RenPy? Not saying there can’t be good reasons, just curious what they are in this case.

    • Ars Fireside@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      4·
      55 minutes ago

      Long story short, it all started with an argument between me and a guy who thought only Japanese VN-related anything is usable normally, and that all Western VN-related software (Ren’Py included) are either clunky or laggy garbage. He also gave a Japanese novel engine called Light.vn (don’t mind the link, it’s the engine name) as an example (there is a killer feature in it: WYSIWYG editor). So I started my engine to prove him wrong.

      After some time, I really saw that Ren’Py is not as fast as it was when I started to use it long ago. But that’s because it uses modern Python, which is by itself not too fast and lightweight anymore.

      That’s why I write my engine in C and aim to make it much faster than Ren’Py and with better UX. Not speaking of a desire to create something meaningful myself.