electronics, etc.

There has been some debate about the licensing of Minetest-c55 and its contributions. I would like to clear up the main point of what is going on.

I am not making this up now, it has been my plan right from the starting of this project. I might change it if the situation some day forces me to, but currently I have no reason to. I have no plans of doing what the plan would allow me to do, though.

Currently the vast majority of the code has been made by me (released under GPL), and the part made by others is under a “do whatever you want to” BSD license.

What this means is that I can for example make a contract to build an engine for some indie game from it, which I feel is fair because I have made most of it.

Now, to me it would be totally fine to have everything made by different people under GPL if the contributions made the majority of the game.

What I don’t like is the transition phase (assuming people will continue to contribute) from the point where I have made the vast majority of the code to the point where I have not.

The problem is, if there were some small GPL’d contributions in the code on which additions made by me would then depend, I couldn’t make the contract (as used in the example), which is not fair because I would have done most of it and started the whole thing. CLARIFICATION: It would force the source code, possibly consisting of huge amounts of added stuff in addition to the Minetest codebase, to be released, which usually is not the way commercial software is made.

Someone could say “just remove the contributions”, but that will probably not be possible, because many new things might depend on them. And it wouldn’t make any sense to pretend making the same stuff again by myself anyway.

What I am going to do is I will first take only BSD licensed contributions. Once (if ever) the contributions start being a major part of the codebase, I will switch to allowing GPL contributions, or alternatively switch everything to BSD, depending on what the best contributors prefer at that time.

If I then won’t do that, people will make their own fork of the existing codebase and choose someone else to manage it.

EDIT 2011-06-05:
I could think of adding GPL’d code even now, if it only contains game content and no engine stuff (or the related engine stuff is under BSD). It would make sense, and wouldn’t contradict the much hated “original plan”. I will leave further thinking for the time when somebody makes some great code and would like to use this scheme.

EDIT 2011-06-23:
I will now take any GPL licensed code.

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