AGPL or LGPL for my MMO add-on?

[PeterX]

Hello fellow developers!

I want to develop a kind of add-on for MMO games. It will contain a server-side library and a client.

Should I use the AGPL or the LGPL?
(a) LGPL advantage: Supports Non-AGPL-games (MIT license, BSD license, GPL etc.)
(b) AGPL advantage: A proprietary game can't extend my code without sharing the additional code.

Greetings
Peter

[dulsi]

The two pieces (server-side and client) don't need to be licensed the same. Are you creating an MMO? Or do you simply intend to make this add-on and other games adopt it? Or both?

If your goal is the first, either license works.

For the second option, I would approach specific games and try to get it adopted. You may need to code this up yourself and they may reject the addition. The license really depends on what the other projects accept. That may not be LGPL or AGPL. In which case you need to decide if you want to hold firm and find another game project or not.

If you are going for both, you can either lobby specific games in which case you will need to pick a license that game project agrees with. Or you can make your game and not worry if others use it. In which case either license works.

[PeterX]

I want to write an add-on, a rather big one but not a complete MMO game. And I want it to be used by many free software projects. I don't want it to be used in proprietary games. It is more important for me that it can be used in many free MMOs than that it is not used in unfree games.

So I think I need a license which can co-exist with many free licenses. So AGPL is not the right thing.

And I think a proprietary game can use and modify GPL or LGPL (or whatever except AGPL) because running the code on a server doesn't count as distribution! So I can as well use a rather permissive license, be it LGPL, MIT, BSD (maybe even CC0?)

Greetings
Peter

[jachosbi]

I had experience working with dev service which renders was met far and beyond my expectations. It wasn't an easy project and the attention to detail was excellent.

[PeterX]

1.) Wow, this sounds like a bot

2.) I dropped the idea of an add-on. I will instead integrate this into my mini MMORPG.

[Jastiv]

GPL is more than sufficient for any client.
I know people are going to disagree with me, but I see AGPL as essential for the server. This is because it tends to be run "server side" and then the server side devs like to hide it, or rather, not bother to put up the source code for it. Whenever they get tired of running the server, then their modifications cease to work. Also, server admins kinda can get competitive with each other or think like "you are taking my players away, I have better mods than you etc etc."
I think people just don't like to use AGPL, because they think it will be too much work to put up a link to the source code for the server somewhere. How the heck is that too hard for server admins if they can spend their time making mods to customize the server. I've even seen this with "free software" games like Minetest, in fact it is a common complaint on the Minetest forums. We should quit being afraid of the AGPL and use it to make server admins finally learn to co-operate.

[PeterX]

Yes, my server code will be AGPL. If AGPL doesn't allow proprietary data, I will write an exception into the license. And my data (art) will be free, too, probably the CC sharealike license.