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Comment by geiagal | Hacker News Reader

This company changes their licensing terms every three years or so. This is the same deal that Game Maker Studio 1.4 was licensed under, then they brought out a subscription model for GMS 2 with no free tier. It's hard to take them at their word and have faith that there will really be a full-features free version "from now on."

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I wonder if there's anything like a "rug-pull-proof" licensing/development model. Even AGPL is not a guarantee, if a single entity owns the copyright to the entire project (through CLAs), and decides to switch to BSL, and has enough influence to make forks irrelevant.

I think Linux's model is the strongest: individual contributors retain copyright, and there are enough individual copyright holders to make relicensing insanely difficult. Coupled with the project's pace (and the pace at which they change the internal APIs) it basically provides such a guarantee. Most projects however are less successful and the users/downstream developers can't count on momentum as the safeguard.

A project could always be abandoned, there's no way to guarantee perpetual labor on your behalf.

What does this have to do with the preceding argument? Yes, the company could abandon the project, but the concern here is about them taking all the previous work (including volunteer contributions) and proceeding with a more restrictive commercial license; that's what we want to prevent.

> the concern here is about them taking all the previous work

Not unless they retroactively change the license on said previous work, which I'm pretty sure they cannot.

I haven't looked into GameMaker's license specifically, but many projects require a copyright assignment as part of their contributor license agreement.

that allows relicensing of the combined work moving forward, not retroactive relicensing of already released code.

That's indeed what I meant, apologies if I was unclear.

Nobody wants to guarantee perpetual future labor. The guarantee we want is that if there's future labor, then we want the fruits of it to remain FOSS.

The concern is not about free labor, the concern is that the product I'm building might get killed by vendor deciding to just fuck me over. Whether the software is free (as in beer or freedom) or not is a secondary concern - I'm merely noting that even a license as strong as AGPL is not a guarantee that I won't get fucked.

It is, though? All that is required is that you're allowed to maintain your own fork. Which is guaranteed to you, in perpetuity, by the AGPL.

How's Linux 2.6 going?

Still working fine? You can run Linux 2.6 just fine on the hardware it supports and even backport newer features you want.

There is. It's called Pay The Author. If you don't have a bare license conditioned on someone's pinky promise, but rather you pay the author and thereby perfect that promise into an actual, enforceable contract, then when someone attempts a rug-pull you can actually file suit to enforce your legal rights. Simple as.

They’ve been bought and sold a few times which is probably related to the licensing changes.

Currently owned by Opera since 2021.

That's the nice thing about a one-time license fee: whether they maintain that license "from now on" is basically irrelevant. There is only "for the version you bought". They can change their license all they want in the future, that one-time fee license will forever be valid for the specific version you were willing to pay for.

It's why some folks are still using Photoshop CS6.

I actively use game maker and as much as I love it, I really got screwed over by this.

I bought game maker studio version 1 for mobile and paid a great deal of money for it, it was shortly before they released the new version of 2.0 with the new model and then android dropped support for 32 bit mobile applications. I was unable to build my android apps moving forward because 1.0 never supported 64bit while 2.0 did.

It took me a bit to finally come around to using the engine again (I currently pay the monthly fee as I develop my game)

Pixel images are stable enough that they remain usable forever. Windows is a relatively stable platform as well, so not updating your development tools mostly works there. But on mobile there are too many breaking changes and updated store requirements for that to work for long.

can you get gamemaker 8 legally somehow?

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