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Licensing
The FreeSpace Open source code is licensed under the following clause:
All source code herein is the property of Volition, Inc. You may not sell or otherwise
commercially exploit the source or things you created based on the source.
This licence is not legally considered an Open Source licence, as it technically does not release any rights. However, this has long been interpreted as allowing contributions (both additions and modifications) to the source code so long as nothing monetary was to be gained from them. The full, current licence may be found in Copying.md in the root directory of the source code.
All original source code of FreeSpace and its modifications are legal property of Volition. However, all new source code created by the SCP and contributors over the years are their respective property.
Most past contributors have released their contributions as not licensed, often under the assumption that their works would be absorbed into the ownership and rights as stated by the Volition license. Legally speaking, "not licensed" means the authors still retain all rights to their contributions and have every legal authority granted to them.
As time went on, the SCP realized that the situation of the legal gray area was potentially dangerous to the future of FreeSpace Open, and it was decided that we needed some level of protection that the Volition license could not promise.
All contributions to the FreeSpace Open Code base made on or after November 1st, 2020, fall under the terms of the Unlicense. Additionally, authors of contributions made before this date who opt-in to the terms of the Unlicense are listed in the Unlicense Contributors section of this page.
This section addresses a number of licenses commonly used by third-party libraries, should a contributor decide to use one in FreeSpace Open.
The most restrictive of licences we've seen, our licence is not compatible with GPL since the original codebase is still property of Volition. This unfortunately means the libraries that are only available under GPL cannot be used in FSO in any form.
The second most restrictive of licences, but unlike the GPL we can use it. If FSO dynamically links to a library (.so, .dll) licensed under LGPL it is then considered to be a "work that uses the Library," and is allowed under LGPL's mandates. Statically linking is also possible as we do provide the source code of FSO right here on GitHub.
The drawback however is that the use of the library "must be prominently displayed" during FSO's run time. At the very least, it must be shown on the credits roll.
It should be possible to use libraries which are licensed under one of these two licences without restriction. BSD has a few restrictions, but nothing that will notably affect us.
These contributors have opted in to having all of their past, present, and future modifications licensed under the terms of Unlicense
DahBlount
MageKing17
Baezon (Asteroth)
Goober5000
z64555
notimaginative (taylor)
JohnAFernandez (Cyborg17, Cyborg)
This document was written by programmers and are not authorities in law, in any shape or form.