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, but is instead considered proprietary.

#Licensing of Contributed Works 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.

This can cause confusion among those unfamiliar with the legalese, and most contributors end up releasing their contributions as unlicensed. It is ultimately the decision of the contributing coder to what their original works (not based on any of the existing source code by Volition) may be licensed under, so long as it respects the clauses of everyone else's licensing. Contributors may not use a GPL licence on their original works in the FSO codebase, since GPL requires all of the sourcecode to be GPL'd.

Compatibility with Library Licences

FSO's licence is generally pretty leniant for using libraries, so long as their license is compatable. Here are a number of common licences we've seen over the years:

GPL

The most restive 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 only available under GPL cannot be used in FSO in any form.

LGPL

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.

BSD and MIT

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 us.

#DISCLAIMER This document was written by coders and only exists to establish a set of guidelines. It is not legally binding or anything like that.