Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Hi,

would you please remember and care to include licenses when publishing your awesome work?

Years pass. The collection of publicly available mod get's bigger and bigger by month or year. Over time, navigating through it get's time consuming and difficult. Tools like automatic mod managers, modpacks and guides help to manage this complexity. Possibility to redistribute modder's work helps greatly. Not everyone wishes to share, and it's everyone's right to make such decision. However, a clause which makes a mod redistributable if, e.g., authors offline for X years, can keep the mod alive. A world in which you can use a mod manager to automatically download and install a modlist composed by other community member would make using mods way easier.

On the other side, if a mod has no license and the author isn't active anymore, it threatens the mod livelihood. File hostings die with years, which can make the mod disappear altogether. New bugs may emerge, which won't be fix if other people aren't allowed to work on the mod. New compatibility issues may arise, which also won't be solved. A permissive license attached to the files can prevent all those issues.

Thank you for the time spent on reading this post,
BaronPampa

P.S. It's my first post - hello

This. This is honestly VERY important. I second it, and hope modders follow the advice.

Can we get some default license template?
I have zero idea what should be stated there and what are the options.

Thank you

Here's a list of what we'll tend to be using, since we want DFU to be open rather than closed. Interkarma gave DFU the MIT license.

https://opensource.org/licenses

What Jay says.

To detail a bit more, the main point when choosing a free license is: do I want to enforce that people publish their modifications under the same license (copyleft protection), or am I OK with people using my software however they want as long as they give me attribution as the author?

If you want people to publish their modifications/improvements to your mod under the same license -> GNU GPL.
If you prefer to set no restriction on the license of derivative works -> MIT or 2-clause BSD.
If you just don't care or are OK either way -> MIT or 2-clause BSD.

Honestly that covers 99.9% of the cases any nonprofit developer needs. While it's certainly possible to explore exotic licenses or even write your license if you really want to, this is almost never needed and you will not go wrong with tried and tested licenses that plenty of developers, big and small, have used before.

PS: This resource is also useful. Clear and to the point: https://choosealicense.com/

Thanks for info, I will include this with a new release

I'm happy that topic gained some traction. I felt uneasy publishing this as I'm only an end-user, but this thing matters in the long run.

Yeah, it made me add a license Why the heck not?

This is what I use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware

Well I dont want my work to be a base for any commercial project.
If someone takes my materials and creates a indie dungeon crawler from it, im not cool with that.
So what license I shall use pls?