Determine license

[tehKaiN]

There are some options. MIT, BSD, Unlicense or GPL. Also, this decision may affect our prods' licenses.

Viral vs Non-viral (GPL)

Pros:

• It would be cool to have more and more open source stuff on Amigas. GPL would enforce it.

Cons:

• People may prefer using other dev tools which don't enforce opening their sources.
• There are some ppl in retrodev who'd like to keep their sources closed
• KaiN hates those mile-long comments on top of every source file
• If we get other contributors that would mean tracing fn history in their respective comment blocks, so that each contributor gets credit for their work

Attribution vs non-attribution (BSD)

Pros:

• Enforcing some kind of attribution in prod could bring more popularity to project

Cons:

• Again, not everyone may be happy with such enforcement and such enforcement could play against us

MIT vs Unlicense

All cons mentioned above are irrelevant if we just use MIT/Unlicense.

MIT is just an info about author without any restrictions, so It's mostly cool. What isn't cool is that most licenses require list of authors who modified source files. I don't really like keeping up-to-date list of contributors in copyright notice. That's getting messy very quickly.

So I propose using unlicense - at first line text below becomes copyrighted, then all rights are passed to everyone who's reading. Since there are no rights to be cleaimed, it's irrelevant who's listed as author. And there are really more important things to do than looking after all that license bs.

[tehKaiN]

After some thoughts I'm not quite happy with idea that someone may take this code, do some potentially useful modifications and not release them to the public, so I was thinking of a license which enforces releasing all changes to ACE. I've dug a bit and LGPL is almost ideal for the task, but there are some caveats when releasing a game made with unchanged ACE:

• you must provide your propertiary code in a form linkable to self-compiled ACE variant - think of all ACE breaking changes and it's not quite a good idea.
• this gets even more messy with static linking - think of distributing all those irrelevant .o files of your main project.

So I've found MPL2.0 which:

• has very short license headers
• requires you to publish all changed sources of MPLed project
• you don't have to publish anything if you just use it as an unchanged backbone.
• it's not viral!

@approxit atm this is my favourite. What are your thoughts?

[approxit]

It's actually not a bad idea. Forcing ACE source to be open can indeed boost some potential contributions.

You have my vote for MPL.

[tehKaiN]

Okay, we're gonna change everything to MPL as soon as i end my work on #31