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Comment by nosefrog | Hacker News Reader

"The final work shall not compete directly with Wizard War, in any mobile app store or on the web." - This line is too restrictive and keeps your custom license from being an open source license. The point of free and open source software is it protects your freedom to modify and distribute the software for any purpose.

Imagine if Microsoft Word distributed itself as "open source", with the exception that one can't use that source to compete with Word. You wouldn't really be able to do much with it, would you? Even simply distributing it to your friends would technically be "competing" with Word.

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We are mainly distributing the source code so people can learn from it, but I would be happy if they used the code or even the artwork to make a substantially different game. I just don't want someone to just slap a different name on it and out-market us or something.

How could I word the license to give people more leeway while still preserving that intention?

Just out of curiosity -- can you preserve that intention?

Nothing really stops me from making my own clone of your game, changing only the assets to be my own, other than it's prohibitively time-consuming (i.e. expensive) for me to do so.

If you release the code -- with any license on it at all -- and someone takes it, uses it, creates a similar game, and then changes the code in a sufficiently significant way to be able to claim that it's not "yours" anymore ... what recourse would you have?

Making a legal argument that a game clone is not a derived work when the source code was literally derived from the original via development over time is a pretty sketchy argument. It's not impossible -- that's sort of what the first open source BSD versions were (AT&T code was replaced piecewise) -- but I wouldn't bet on it.

Cloning of interface and operation (but not artwork) is widely held to be legal, but in general all successful clones are clean room clones.

"Open source" has a very well-defined, widely accepted meaning. Part of this is that an open source license cannot restrict the purpose for which the code is used. This isn't making a value judgement on such licenses: it's just defining "open source".

If you actually want your code to be open source, you should use one of the common licenses like the GPL or BSD license; this makes life easier both for you and people who would use your code. Since these licenses are common, people know exactly how they work and are willing to trust them. A custom license like yours seems much riskier to use: for example, how is "competes with" defined?

You can license the code and the artistic assets separately. This is what Id does with its old Quake engines. This way the code is still open source in the strictest sense of the word, but somebody couldn't just resell your game as-is.

You can license the assets under one of the Creative Commons licenses. These have well-defined and well-understood terms that you can mix and match to find something that suits your needs.

This comment needs more attention.

Assets licensed with CC (use the one that requires permission)

Code licensed with real Open Source (example: MIT license)

Affero GPL might be ideal for you. It means that both network and local users of an app get the source code. So, maybe someone out-markets you, but the users still must get the source. But you won't necessarily get attribution if that's what you're after (CC is good for that).

Why not keep the code open and keep the assets on a normal copyright basis? That's what iD/Bungie do (did).

I think he or she wants you to be able to add features and improve the game but not use it to make their own game.

Yes, and a license that codifies that intent isn't "open source". Open Source Software (as defined by the Open Source Initiative, the ones who came up with the term), was actually a re-branding of the term "Free Software". Open source software, as with free software, protects your freedoms as the owner of that software to modify, distribute, and study the code, with no conditions on any of those freedoms. What the author is doing is certainly commendable, and it would benefit us all if they took the next step and made their software fully open source.

That's only one intent of open source, this whole GPL vs MIT/Apache etc license has been raging for as long as the Open Source era has been upon us.

The GPL and MIT licenses both protect your freedoms to modify and distribute the software for any purpose. The "raging debate" is about whether or not derivative software should also be required to protect your freedom.

Free as in speech not as in beer.

So if they're not even allowed to use the words "open source", what is in your opinion the correct term for this?

Microsoft sometimes licenses things like this and it's commonly referred to as "shared source."

GPL is open source(shitty open source, but open source nonetheless), yet you can't use that code commercially.

Edit for downvotes: Perhaps I should have been more clear. As this is iOS code, you cannot in fact use it commercially. GPL code is not allowed on the App Store. Period.

You can use GPL code commercially (and plenty of companies do), what you can't do is relicense it under a proprietary license.

You'd have to explain that to Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL and also sold Emacs and other free[1] software commercially during the 80s and 90s.

[1]: free software and open source software are accepted by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative as being pretty much the same thing (ie 99% of OSI-approved open source licenses are also FSF-approved, and vice versa).

A quarter century after this thing was published and we still read stuff like this on the internet?

GPL may make certain commercial models harder, but there's no "can't use" prohibition in the license.

The condition on all potential uses (commercial and non-commercial) is the same: your derivative source code must remain available under the same terms.

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