Use in a commercial product
Closed this issue · 7 comments
Hi, I'm the release engineer for Planetarian for Steam. I noticed this uses GPL3 which might make it hard to use this in a commercial product for Linux/OSX support. I'm open to any ideas or solutions if there's any interest in this.
If not you may close this ticket.
Thanks.
So rlvm used to use GPLv2. The last commit that was licensed under GPLv2
46a1157 in 2008. The switch to GPLv3 was
more to show support for the Free Software Foundation than for practical
reasons. I personally have no problem discussing relicensing what I did for
rlvm to GPLv2 or later.
Assuming that, you'd also have to revert a few things in your local copy
contributed by third parties (or get them to agree to relicensing), as
there have been a handful of people who have changed code in rlvm:
You can just revert #42 locally. It is a stub implementation of the Tomoyo
After DLL. Completely non operational, and irrelevant to Planetarian.
The biggest contribution you'll probably have to worry about is #34:
Support for reading tonecurve data out of TCC files. This is used in
Planetarian quite a bit.
There were also a series of compile fixes contributed by #33. It's fairly
mechanical, but you probably want to just check in with the author.
The last person you might want to check in with is Marek Vasut, who sent
his patches via email. His email address is marek.vasut@gmail.com.
That's all the people who have added code to rlvm after the switch to
GPLv3. The other patches by 3rd parties touch the build system or are pure
line deletion.
On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 9:34 PM, Raymond Qian notifications@github.com
wrote:
Hi, I'm the release engineer for Planetarian for Steam. I noticed this
uses GPL3 which might make it hard to use this in a commercial product for
Linux/OSX support. I'm open to any ideas or solutions if there's any
interest in this.If not you may close this ticket.
Thanks.
—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#60.
-- Elliot
Thanks for the details of the commits, I'll get a hold of all those people and ask if they can post a yes/no on this thread on converting back to GPLv2.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
Just gonna throw this here. Might be an option if the GPLv2/3 thing went side way for whatever reason.
Why the GPL (v3 or v2) would be a problem? You would sell the engine with the assets like any game, except that the engine would be open source (like id software engines). Several other do the same, like Higurashi (all languages), TypeMoon's games, etc.
You have to make a modification to the engine that as to be kept undisclosed?
It's not me that might have problem (I don't write VN to begin with...)
IIRC, the RealLive enigne for each game is not compatible with each other. So while Planetarian might be fine, Clannad might not. And if (and that is a big if) Visual Art's provides engine-side support, they may not take open-sourcing of those patches so kindly.
Again, it's all theoretical. Please don't take this the wrong way.
I have a branch locally which has everything mentioned above reverted (or trimmed down to under the 10 lines per person copyrightable limit). I'm going to take a stab at clean room rebuilding the TCC patch.
In the case of Marek's patches, most of them actually aren't to GPL code, so things should be OK there.
Raymond: Please email me at eglaysher@gmail.com for further discussion. I can't find your email address on the web.
Closing this bug.