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?