Seems at odds with their repo's MIT license, which explicitly allows it to be sold.
https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine/blob/master/LICENSE
Seems at odds with their repo's MIT license, which explicitly allows it to be sold.
https://github.com/TombEngine/TombEngine/blob/master/LICENSE
I guess it's ok to build it and sell it but not to sell the binaries provided? It's odd indeed. Most likely split brain decision.
Most likely it's from inexperience with licensing. Many people choose MIT because it's the most popular open source license, without really thinking about how permissive it is and whether they want that for their project.
Maybe someone from this thread could open an issue and suggest they clarify this.
I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.
People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences. Developers are not lawyers.
There are plenty of guides, but most are written by people arguing for a particular license so do not come across as impartial.
IMO people need to ask questions such as whether they want to allow proprietary forks, whether they want anti-tivoisation, whether people using an install over a network need access to the code, etc. and then decide on a license. If you know what you want then it should not be hard to narrow down the choice.
> I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
> People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences
> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
Is it any wonder that people are confused when this is the only valid response to most of their licensing questions?
> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
Is it any wonder that developors don't understand licensing very well when this is the response to majority of their licensing questions?
How could you be anything except confused and uncertain?
The solution is to stick to well known and well understood licences and not tinker with them.
They could just use the MIT license, or GPL of whatever they like. Using MIT and then modifying it in the README is the problem.
This is only the response to the majority of (or even very many) questions if you decide to use a DIY license.
> Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.
How would a copyleft license prevent it from being sold?
It doesn't, I was expressing my personal opinion on what kind of license I'd choose.
However, that was a bit of a non sequitur to end the comment on, my apologies.
> How would a copyleft license prevent it from being sold?
It doesn't but, it prevents the code from being sold, without the source code attached.
I can pull the code, add some levels, polish this more, call CaveRider, and sell it as a binary. With GPL, you can't do that. You need to add the source to the archive, or make it accessible without any walls.
It doesn't, but whoever sells it needs to contribute back whatever they did with it is almost as good.
It's not quite as good because some games still get griefers who sell versions on some market places without otherwise giving back to the community who maintains them.
But it's better than MIT for sure.
It doesn't, but makes it economically unviable. There's hot much point selling something your customers can duplicate for free and give to your other customers for free. grsecurity barely manages it and only because they don't have many customers and make it hard to become a customer.