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.
Keep your project healthy and alive by using LGPL or some similar FLOSS license instead of MIT. MIT and other permissive licenses are horrible.
Horrible? Okay, then. Can you explain why? I mean, I know that Ren’Py is using MIT, and there are no problems with anything as far as I can tell. So, what’s wrong with it?
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:
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.
Ooh, yes for for this case, the LGPL would be a good middle-ground for OP’s concerns.
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 derivative works either open or closed, by their choice.
As for AGPL, I know nothing, unfortunately.
AGPL is GPL + network services protection (preventing someone taking your code and spinning up a for-profit selling services without contribution back). If you don’t care about people stealing your code, closing it, and selling services based on it, then there is no need to consider strict copyleft licenses.
That’s understandable, though one of the other commenters suggested the LGPL which might make for a good fit for your case. Here’s a comparison with the other two if you’re interested.
The AGPL is just the GPL with extra rules requiring sharing the code even if you expose it exclusively via a service.
They do pretty much the same thing. If there are nuances, I do not know about them.
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.
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.
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.
Amongst those 2 toss a coin honestly ¯_(ツ)_/¯
What about the non-endorsement clause, then?
