Post by Jordan in Jam Feedback/Suggestions

Make an Open Source Project for Godot Jam » Community

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Hello, before anything else I would like to say that I love the idea for this jam and hope it garners attention and success. I think this is a great way to strengthen Godot's ecosystem while playing to it main appeal of openness. I also really like that you have made this a month-long jam: this should make development less strained and more productive.

I have a question about the rules, regarding licensing. Are the public domain/MIT licenses a hard requirement for all submissions? I am under the impression it is a suggestion (given that the Project Criteria list only says submissions "must be open source"), but the phrasing "licenses should be..." leaves things ambiguous.

Also, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to encourage users to also put their submissions on the Godot Asset Library. It is relatively small and I didn't even know it existed until a few months ago.

Thank you for hosting this jam! Hoping I will be able to participate.

RancidMilk1 year ago

Thanks! Yeah the main goal for the jam is to try to bring more example projects or tools into the world, so for things like the duration, it gives people plenty of time to do it, even if they’re busy with life. Also allows some people to pop in late.

So this is what I have at the moment on the jam page:

Code licenses should be CC0 or MIT. The only exception for this is if you have a dependency that requires a different open-source license.

Right now the jam does allow for other licenses if there’s a dependency that needs it involved. What license where you looking to use? I do want to discourage people from going with GPL as much as possible as it’ll get its non-permissive cooties all over my permissive engine. While I don’t really mind other permissive licenses, keeping things MIT/CC0 keeps licensing everything super easy and consistent with Godot. If enough people interested in the jam want GPL or other licenses, I’d consider backpedaling on that rule.

I’ll add a section suggesting people consider trying to publish it to the asset library.

I hope you will be able to too and good luck if you do!!

Jordan1 year ago

Sorry for the late reply, I didn't notice that I got a response. It is likely too late for this, but I'd like to share my thoughts on licensing, both for my own submission and on potential GPL submissions.

Since you asked how I might license my submission, I lean towards MPL because I consider it a decent balance between copyleft's tenet of "I give you the source code, you give me your changes back" while still being flexible in how it allows code reuse. For a large scale, open source project I would likely lean towards GPL, but for a jam submission, let alone one whose purpose is education, something less restrictive is more appropriate.

That being said, I would only choose MPL if I can realistically expect there even being outside changes to merge into upstream. This is a jam after all, and I may end up producing something so small that any copyleft at all would just get in the way. Although I'm partial to Apache or WTFPL, should I choose a fully permissive license, I would likely go with MIT as per your reasoning.

I also personally disagree with banning GPL (restrictions and all, it's still open source), but you're right in that it should be discouraged for this jam, and I doubt there will actually be any GPL submissions anyway. And at the end of the day, these are just the opinions of one guy; every license has its time and place, and permissiveness was an excellent choice for something in desperate need of software freedom as a game engine.

Sorry for being long winded and opinionated. Thank you very much for responding and taking my suggestions into consideration. Hope all goes well, and regardless of whether or not I participate, I look forward to seeing the entries!

itch.io

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