There are dozens of licenses one could use to release his intellectual creations. We will focus on the ones we are to use with OSDL and its related game-releasing club, either for the licenses we chose for our own work or for the ones that are used by projects we rely on (libraries, multimedia content, and so on).
Intellectual property is a major concern in the Internet, it is a tough subject, especially for non native-english speakers, we will do our best to clarify it a bit.
Some of these licenses (GPL, LGPL and FDL) belong to the copyleft family. Copyleft is a general method for making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well. Translations (often unofficial) are available for the three main copyleft licenses, which are GPL, LGPL and FDL. French translations can be found here.
As it is not easy to figure out how licenses might be compared, we advise you to read GNU's licenses Categorization where the major ones are defined and explained. Here is GNU's useful map :
One can also use the licence chooser, made available by Creative Commons, to better understand license definitions.
The full name of the license you can see below is a link to the legal definition of the license, when available.
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According to Carlos A. Camacho (Editor-in-Chief) : "It is simple, in order to use them, you must release a Mac version of your game first. Since you plan to release your game cross-platform (Mac/Linux), that is fine. The other points about providing credit to me/iDevGames is required in either your About Window, game's credits or web site."
According to John Buckman (Founder) : [about releasing a free open-source video game using songs from Magnatune] : "it's fine, especially if you release your software under a creative commons license. If you use the GPL for your game, it's also fine, as long as no-one sells your game, in which case who-ever sold the game would need to license the music for commercial use."
The OSDL project, and especially our club, will release its work according to the following scheme (which is still to be validated by project members) :
We have to take a lot of care about this issue, because the licenses we will choose will imply much about what we can do with the creations we use and what others will be able to do with what we produce. At the moment, having our libraries released through the LGPL license means that a commercial project might use them without our acknowledgment, but any improvement it would make to our work would have to be given back to the community. We believe it is a fair deal, and that it does not close too many doors, even for us.
We have to take into account too that :
Our work will come from many sources, whose contents are released under different open license schemes. We will have to cope with mixed licenses, whereas, first, frequently they force projects using them to have the same license, and, second, they are incompatible one with the others. We will work on that as soon as we know exactly to what content this issue will apply.
If you have information more detailed or more recent than those presented in this document, if you noticed errors, neglects or points insufficiently discussed, drop us a line!