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What would a good free license for a computer game project that also included large amounts of writing and story? E.g. the GPL only really talks about code, and that leaves the relationship with other kinds of derivative works rather unclear - for instance if someone wanted to write a novel set in the world of the game. CC-BY-SA, maybe?
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I'm not sure if Markus means GPL for code and CC-BY-SA for other stuff or if he means that the whole kaboodle could be dual-licensed under both, but in any case the latter would probably be a nice and flexible solution. There wouldn't be different terms for the code and the art assets, but there would still be a familiar license on both styles of content.
So yeah, what you just said ;)Feb 14, 2013
I strongly recommend not to do any dual licensing: you would not be allowed to incorporate any GPL-only code into your codebase. I meant separate licenses: code GPL, documentation and artwork CC. I do not understand your remark regarding "elegance". Having one license that does not fit more than half of your project is even less elegant. Elegance does not exist in an impossible universe.Feb 14, 2013
Is it possible to split the project architecturally into an engine and story files? Then you could GPL the engine and CC-BY-SA the story file. Again with the interactive fiction example, they have engine code consisting of virtual machine interpreters and story file to virtual machine compilers, which contains no story elements, and story files which contain the story content and program logic specific to that story written in the interactive fiction programming language.
The story files are still sorta-programs, but they don't benefit much from GPL instead of CC licensing, since the only code they have is for the purposes of that particular story. Gameplay engines and reusable libraries for story files can just use straight GPL.Feb 14, 2013
Many things are possible, some are sensible, but "story file" is so generic that it really depends on the case at hand whether you want to treat it more like source code, or more like artwork.Feb 14, 2013
I'm thinking of something like the specific story files you do with, say, the Inform interactive fiction authoring system.
Here's an Inform 6 example: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/inform/vespers.inf Here's one for the fancy NLP Inform 7: http://inform7.com/learn/eg/dm/source.txt
The most salient thing I see here, licensing-wise, is that the story files contain very little of the sort of source code which could make things better for lots of different projects if people kept contributing to it and publishing the contributions open-source. Changes to story files mostly serves to make that particular game behave differently and have fewer bugs. Code that can benefit many different projects can be split off from the story file into a story content agnostic library.Feb 14, 2013
Hmm, the folks over at my parallel Facebook thread seem to be leaning more towards dual licensing: https://www.facebook.com/Xuenay/posts/10151743541683662Feb 14, 2013