Changing licenses - perilous ground

[Moonwards]

We are in the process of seeking support so we can continue developing Moonwards - a FOSS MMO that simulates a town on the moon in the late 21st century. It's a sandbox game that's completely undirected play, the main idea is that over time people develop the town through permanent additions to it, including code that enhances the activities available.

Our principal need is financial support, at this point. We need more contributors but that isn't very viable without a full-time staff, for which we need funds. Right now the project is licensed MIT (and CC-BY to cover assets that aren't software). We have pondered changing our license, as people we've talked to have been concerned about our ability to charge fees for anything in it. (Our business model includes charging monthly fees for a few totally non-essential extras.)

So, this is really speculative, but we need to think about it.

Switching from MIT to GNUv3 - this would give us protection from people copycatting the game as a closed product. This could be an issue if, by chance, they had the resources to build up a community because they could do it as a commercial venture. If we were a GNU project our competition wouldn't have much chance of creating a commercial venture because it couldn't be closed.

Creating a closed source fork of the project - Here's the scenario - we pursue funding from sources who will want to be paid back or turn a profit, but they think we won't be able to generate revenue as long as we are FOSS. If there was sufficient reason to do so, in terms of ensuring the future of the project, we'd be willing to close source in that case. My aim would be to open source again down the road when we were able.

We could really use input on this. I've thought about hiring a lawyer familiar with open source to discuss it. Any tips?

[Julius]

I would consider switching to the AGPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html for the server side code (only). This ensures that any other entity hosting a server would have to contribute back all the changes they make.

Otherwise I would keep it as is, but you could make the pre-compiled client binaries only available through platforms like Steam and itch.io and ask for a small sum in exchange (as a sort of donation without hiding the fact that anyone can also obtain it for free from the source). There are some examples of open source games having been quite successful with such a model. For example: https://te4.org/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2596 ... f_MajEyal/

But truth to be told: making money from open source games is hard. So good luck

[drummyfish]

Definitely don't consider and talk out loud about "close sourcing" the project for a while, that will just discourage most FOSS people and discredit your project in the eyes of many, no one does this and it looks very shady, even if your intentions are good, which I completely believe. You should make a decision about being free or not and then stick to that no matter what. Many FOSS projects have the line "this is and will be free forever" somewhere at the top of their website, and it's a strong promise that a lot of people will appreciate and value.

About the specific license: permissive licensing will more likely bring you more sponsors because these sponsors will be better able to make money off of what they support -- consider Godot, it is licensed under MIT and they're doing great, making money, having sponsors. I am personally for permissive licensing simply because it's simpler, gives everyone more freedom, which is always better.

Also an important thing: if you choose MIT, you can later switch to GPL, but not the other way around (at least not easily with many contributors).

Anyway, if you want to """protect""" your project against corporations, you can use GPL (AGPL for server, as mentioned above), but it comes for a price of some disadvantages: it's a more complex licensing with many conditions to follow, it may discourage sponsors, relicensing is hard, ... and in the end corporations violate GPL anyway (take a look e.g. at Win XP source leak). IMHO the real life point of free licenses is allowing people to do stuff with your project (i.e. a guarantee no one will sue them), NOT stopping someone from doing stuff with your project (because licenses are hard to enforce and violations are also hard to detect and prove, you can't realistically wage a legal war with a corporation). In my experience people who make their first FOSS project are often overly paranoid and think everyone will try to steal and abuse everything they create and they want to hide behind big licenses for this reason, but then over time they find real significant abuse happens very rarely and complex licensing is more of a burden.

About making money on FOSS, I don't have any experience with it, but it seems to me that most successful projects start purely hobbyist and then when they are really good, people will start to support them. IMHO at this stage you should try to stay not dependent on funding -- you can try to get some money, but don't make it so that if you don't get money the project dies. I.e. money can accelerate your project, but it should be able to continue without it, and money shouldn't be your goal. At this point focus on creating a good game and getting people interested in it, and if it's really good, the money will come.

[Moonwards]

It's interesting, I felt comfortable with the MIT license until I was brushed off by a few people in the game biz because we are FOSS. And I wasn't even looking for anything more than consulting services, for which I was willing to pay. So, I figured I should look for the way to protect ourselves as much as we can, which is AGPL.

Your points are well taken. Today I need to draft letters to a couple of foundations who might be a good fit for supporting our work. What we are doing is ambitious enough that I don't think I'll get very far if I can't have at least the Project Manager on staff, and quite possibly a tech artist and a general programmer. I can continue to work on this myself indefinitely without pay, full time. But I'm not a programmer, and so I can only do so much on my own with what we have. So, I feel pressure I otherwise wouldn't to secure some funding. What can I say, Moonwards is a project I started because I wanted to build it, specifically, and before that I had no interest in game dev.

There is the option of dual licensing, where it's AGPL unless you pay a licensing fee, in which case you can do what you want. Dual licensing is even more confusing to me than ordinary licenses, but if it helps in pursuing funding, then it may be the right thing to do. I realize in many ways I'm putting the cart before the horse here. It's just that before I start writing a bunch of letters and calling people up, it is a matter I feel I should be able to be clear on, and put the right foot forward with groups I may need.

[Magellan]

It's interesting, I felt comfortable with the MIT license until I was brushed off by a few people in the game biz because we are FOSS. And I wasn't even looking for anything more than consulting services, for which I was willing to pay. So, I figured I should look for the way to protect ourselves as much as we can, which is AGPL.

Your points are well taken. Today I need to draft letters to a couple of foundations who might be a good fit for supporting our work. What we are doing is ambitious enough that I don't think I'll get very far if I can't have at least the Project Manager on staff, and quite possibly a tech artist and a general programmer. I can continue to work on this myself indefinitely without pay, full time. But I'm not a programmer, and so I can only do so much on my own with what we have. So, I feel pressure I otherwise wouldn't to secure some funding. What can I say, Moonwards is a project I started because I wanted to build it, specifically, and before that I had no interest in game dev.

There is the option of dual licensing, where it's AGPL unless you pay a licensing fee, in which case you can do what you want. Dual licensing is even more confusing to me than ordinary licenses, but if it helps in pursuing funding, then it may be the right thing to do. I realize in many ways I'm putting the cart before the horse here. It's just that before I start writing a bunch of letters and calling people up, it is a matter I feel I should be able to be clear on, and put the right foot forward with groups I may need.

You would probably be best served by getting a real lawyer involved. If you are already at the stage where you are trying to secure funding to pay multiple staff members, you probably will need to get lawyers involved pretty soon anyway. It would be a good idea to go ahead and get a real copyright law expert onboard since you are going in a heterodox direction (i.e. FOSS game but trying to make money) for the video game industry. Best of luck!

[Moonwards]

Yes, we really should get a lawyer soon, if only for consultation.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we are trying to make money. I'm just trying to pay the bills. At the moment, I expect a not-for-profit format will be what we use. I'm in discussions with a representative of Software in the Public Interest to see if we can join as an associated project. In terms of players, the proposed charges would be monthly fees only for those who choose certain extras that most players could live without. And those wouldn't be charged unless we already had a strong community. As the point of the game is education regarding space and space development, I would expect users to treat that the same way as contributing to Patreon is considered - they'd pay as much because they believe in the project as because they want the perk. Even if this was fully developed it wouldn't be a typical commercial model.

I just wanted to make that clear, because saying you want to make money on a FOSS game sounds wrong to pretty much everyone right off the bat.

[PeterX]

I just wanted to make that clear, because saying you want to make money on a FOSS game sounds wrong to pretty much everyone right off the bat.

Well, some rare cases of free SW make money. For example Ryzom if I am informed correctly.

Besides a lawyer you probably gonna need a business expert. Because you want to decide on a business model but are probably not fully aware of the consequences! Or maybe buy a marketing book?
Maybe this:
https://guykawasaki.com/books/the-art-of-the-start/
I'm not sure if this book will be useful to you. It's just a suggestion.

Greetings
Peter

[Moonwards]

Because you want to decide on a business model but are probably not fully aware of the consequences! Or maybe buy a marketing book?
Maybe this:
https://guykawasaki.com/books/the-art-of-the-start/
I'm not sure if this book will be useful to you. It's just a suggestion.

Yeah, that is really the crux of the issue. I am very nervous about approaching people looking for funding when I can't answer all sorts of basic questions about our business model. And I really think if I hope to get good advice and maybe support, I need to do some homework first.

Perhaps I'll get that book. I would have to make time to read it, though. I guess that's necessary.

[drummyfish]

Let me add I admire your courage and thanks for trying to do a good thing and create a serious game that is free as in freedom, it's really awesome. We here at the forums will try to help as we can.

I'm a little worried because your goal is one of the most difficult things to succeed in, and if you have no experience there is a huge chance you will fail, lose not only money but also motivation and work you put into it, that's why I recommended you keep this a hobby at this moment, until you have a stable core team and a real community of players, which will just appeal to investors much more than basically a small prototype. However I may very well be wrong, I'm just some Internet guy. I just think you should be aware of what you're getting into. If you have some capital you may be able to create a somewhat nice game, but with the goal of creating a completely FOSS game I think it will always be more or less a charity, not a very profitable business. Remember you'll be competing with commercial games developed by big corporations in an extremely competitive field.

If you want to gain more experience, maybe you could try to create a very small FOSS game and sell it e.g. at itch.io, to get an idea about what effort it takes and what money you can expect, what licenses work -- as a parallel side project, you don't have to stop working on Moonwards of course. Something like this game maybe. Jumping right into a full 3D MMO without a prior experience seems like a crazy scary leap.

Anyway, if you really succeed in this, I'll be a very happy person.

[Moonwards]

Yes, it is pretty crazy and scary. I don't deny this.

There are a couple things that help though. I have no need to work for a living. I didn't select this project because I wanted to make money, but just because I wanted to do it. I can continue chipping away at it as long as I want. And I do have a core team, of three people, who are all staying on (part time) without pay. That includes the Project Manager, who has already written the main networking code.

This isn't a question of convincing a game studio that they can make money on this. It's a question of convincing a space development advocate that this has a good enough shot of shifting public opinion in favor of space development that it's worth funding. I really think we have a shot at that.