When deciding which license to choose for your mod, you should determine whether you want others to be able to share (mirror) your mod and adapt it (change your mod content and incorporate it into other projects).
Consider whether you want to allow the community to expand on your efforts. If you find yourself unable to continue working on a project, your choice of license will determine the future of your mod.
If you do want to allow others to share and adapt your work, you should figure out if you want to place any conditions on them. For example, will you permit people to include your mod content in products that can be sold for a profit? Do you care if your work is properly attributed to you when used in another project?
Based on your answers to these questions, you should be able to find a suitable license in the tables below. Follow the link to find a LICENSE file you can include in the root directory of your repository.
Commercial use is restricted:
| License | Permissions |
|---|---|
| None | None: "All rights reserved" |
| CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 | Share the work non-commercially |
| CC-BY-NC-4.0 | Share and adapt the work non-commercially |
Commercial use is permitted:
| License | Permissions |
|---|---|
| CC-BY-ND-4.0 | Share the work |
| CC-BY-4.0 | Share and adapt the work |
| CC0-1.0 | Share and adapt the work without attribution or any other conditions |
Do you want to promote free culture by requiring works that incorporate your mod content to use a similar license? Consider one of the following share-alike licenses.
| License | Permissions |
|---|---|
| CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 | Share and adapt the work non-commercially so long as a similar license is used |
| CC-BY-SA-4.0 | Share and adapt the work so long as a similar license is used |
You may have heard that the Creative Commons licenses are not designed for code, and a free software license may be more appropriate. This is good advice for most software, but it doesn't seem appropriate for WeiDU mods. The source code for mods is generally made up of .tp2 scripts that WeiDU interprets. Since patents are unlikely to be a factor and .tp2 scripts can't be compiled into binary libraries, there's no need to choose a license that addresses those issues.
That being said, if you wish to include content in your mod from something that is using a copyleft license like the GPL or LGPL, then you may need to use a similar license. I'll list here several popular free software licenses and their approximate permissions, as I understand them.
| License | Permissions | CC Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| GPL | Share and adapt the work so long as a similar license is used | CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
| LGPL | Share and adapt the work so long as a similar license is used | CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
| MIT | Share and adapt the work | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Apache | Share and adapt the work | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Unlicense | Share and adapt the work without attribution or any other conditions | CC0-1.0 |