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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

honestly, i wish the spirit behind that license were easier to formalise and publish - it roughly says "look, this is a game i made and am selling, and i don't want people taking this repo and just cloning the game for free. but we are a community of people making games, and i would love to provide the code and other assets as building blocks that will let other people make their own games more easily."

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I honestly believe AGPLv3 for the software and CC BY-SA 4.0 for the non-software assets would absolutely be everything one would need for this project. Is there an example of a commercial AGPLv3 (or even any other copyleft license) game being cloned and sold without modification? I feel like this extra effort towards restrictions is rather unnecessary and putting the cart before the horse.

AGPL3 doesn't cut it if you want to allow "take literally every piece of this code and remix it into your own possibly closed-source game, just don't try to appropriate my game". it's sad that such a common-sense intent is so hard to work into a legally sound license.

Isn't that covered by trademark? Or what do you mean by appropriate?

they spell it out in the license - don't essentially republish "even the ocean" with a few tweaks and the serial numbers filed off. use their code (and maybe even assets? that wasn't entirely clear) for your own work, not their game-as-a-whole.

> and i don't want people taking this repo and just cloning the game for free.

they don't mind that actually... they just want you to not sell it or anything too close to the original game. if you want to figure out how to compile it and play it they are fine with it. it seems to be the don't screw me over license.

right, i should have made that distinction!

So... not open source, but pretending to be.

Open source, in the literal sense of the word.

Open source in only the literal sense of the word. It's like calling a wild boar from the midwestern coast of Africa a "Guinea pig". It's not actually lying (/pretending/cetera), since they clearly expect people to understand the distinction they're making, and so far it looks like most do, but it's still unforunately unclear (and rather needlessly so, since "source available" works just as well, if equally imprecisely).

They didn't say "Open Source", they said "open-source".

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