With any project with multiple contributors, it’s best to get some clarity on the copyright status of the contributions right from the start, especially if we have hopes of this becoming popular at some point...
Since it’s the clearest and safest to explicitly assign all the copyrights to a single legal person, and it would be a bit of a hassle at this point to set up a separate legal entity that one could assign them to, I’m guessing that it would be the easiest if they were assigned to me? So that people wouldn’t feel threatened about how their work might be used, the assignment would be on the condition that the work be licensed under an appropriate free license. (As explained e.g. here.)
The GPL is a nice license for code, but not necessarily for fiction—if someone wanted to write a novel based on the events of the game, for example, applying the GPL to that would get a bit weird. On the other hand, something like CreativeCommons-Attribution-ShareAlike is good for fiction, but not so much for code.
So maybe combine the two. I asked about this on my Facebook and Google Plus feeds, and the comments in those places are somewhat split between dual-licensing the whole project with both GPL and CC-BY-SA, or licensing the code with GPL and the art and writing with CC-BY-SA. I don’t really know which option would be better, myself, or whether it really even matters. Thoughts?
I am unlikely to contribute to this project, so this is just the bikeshed peanut gallery, but:
Please use MIT or BSD for code, rather than GPL, unless you specifically value the restrictions on reuse placed by the GPL. (And if the latter is the case, I ask you: what advantage do you gain in this scenario from people not using your code?)
Some of my readings also suggest that if there’s going to be any occasional or one-off contributors, you might want to settle early all of the important “money” issues and questions.
GPL and CC do prevent quite a few problems in this regard, but won’t do anything for people getting surprised or feeling wronged for some reason or another. The usual recommendation is to keep written records and archived copies of everything, including discussions and threads like this one.
I’d agree that for simplicity, just go GPL for the whole thing. I can’t see why the license and rights owner couldn’t change the entire licensing model at a later date anyway, but I’m no expert. This could also be one of the things people could be uncomfortable with as the project nears completion, though.
For simplicity, I agree that the copyright should be assigned to you. Also I would go for GPL for both the code and the fiction, the less time is lost on those matters the better. If the game comes out in a definite form, then the fiction copyright might become an issue, but for now it doesn’t seem fundamental...
The obligatory copyright stuff
With any project with multiple contributors, it’s best to get some clarity on the copyright status of the contributions right from the start, especially if we have hopes of this becoming popular at some point...
Since it’s the clearest and safest to explicitly assign all the copyrights to a single legal person, and it would be a bit of a hassle at this point to set up a separate legal entity that one could assign them to, I’m guessing that it would be the easiest if they were assigned to me? So that people wouldn’t feel threatened about how their work might be used, the assignment would be on the condition that the work be licensed under an appropriate free license. (As explained e.g. here.)
The GPL is a nice license for code, but not necessarily for fiction—if someone wanted to write a novel based on the events of the game, for example, applying the GPL to that would get a bit weird. On the other hand, something like CreativeCommons-Attribution-ShareAlike is good for fiction, but not so much for code.
So maybe combine the two. I asked about this on my Facebook and Google Plus feeds, and the comments in those places are somewhat split between dual-licensing the whole project with both GPL and CC-BY-SA, or licensing the code with GPL and the art and writing with CC-BY-SA. I don’t really know which option would be better, myself, or whether it really even matters. Thoughts?
I am unlikely to contribute to this project, so this is just the bikeshed peanut gallery, but:
Please use MIT or BSD for code, rather than GPL, unless you specifically value the restrictions on reuse placed by the GPL. (And if the latter is the case, I ask you: what advantage do you gain in this scenario from people not using your code?)
Some of my readings also suggest that if there’s going to be any occasional or one-off contributors, you might want to settle early all of the important “money” issues and questions.
GPL and CC do prevent quite a few problems in this regard, but won’t do anything for people getting surprised or feeling wronged for some reason or another. The usual recommendation is to keep written records and archived copies of everything, including discussions and threads like this one.
I’d agree that for simplicity, just go GPL for the whole thing. I can’t see why the license and rights owner couldn’t change the entire licensing model at a later date anyway, but I’m no expert. This could also be one of the things people could be uncomfortable with as the project nears completion, though.
For simplicity, I agree that the copyright should be assigned to you. Also I would go for GPL for both the code and the fiction, the less time is lost on those matters the better. If the game comes out in a definite form, then the fiction copyright might become an issue, but for now it doesn’t seem fundamental...