How best to share and license?

Support
#1

When I get something ready to share (imminently) I have a few questions about how best to do that.

(Also not sure if this is the best category for this post, please advise.)

LICENSES:
I’m new to open development and sharing.

  1. What copyright license should I put in the game files to ensure that the game remains mine until (with luck) move38 wants to publish it? Does my not wanting to use my full real name at the moment make that difficult? (Are copyrights and licenses enforceable when attributed to aliases and pseudonyms?)

  2. Does the Arduino or Blink source code lock us into/out of any kind of licensing / copyright?

  3. Are these dumb questions and/or should I be asking other ones?

SHARING CODE:

  1. is GitHub preferred?

  2. where to post links to GitHub projects or source code directly to solicit playest and code review feedback?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

#2

IANAL and you most likely need one if you are really worried about all this.

Personally I license all my code in a very permissive license so anyone can do basically whatever they want with it.

Apache License 2.0

A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.

Permissions

  • Commercial use
  • Modification
  • Distribution
  • Patent use
  • Private use

Limitations

  • Trademark use
  • Liability
  • Warranty

Conditions

  • License and copyright notice
  • State changes

Using your real name or not is most likely completely irrelevant in this context. But, again, if you want to do things really the right way, you better get a lawyer to advise you.

AFAIK, using Arduino has no effect on what licenses you can use, but Blinklib itself is GPL so, in theory, any derived code (which might be interpreted as any code that uses it as Blinklib is statically linked into the resulting binary file) has to either be GPL licensed or use a GPL compatible license (Apache 2.0 is GPL compatible). But, and I have to continue stressing this, I am not a lawyer. :slight_smile:

Github is probably the easiest and most reliable way to share your code without having to pay for it, yes. If you are writing a game, I guess Game Ideas is a good place to say anything related to this.

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