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A comment on GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have one-time fee license. Parent comment

Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by rollcat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:54AM (#38365353)
I wonder if there's anything like a "rug-pull-proof" licensing/development model. Even AGPL is not a guarantee, if a single entity owns the copyright to the entire project (through CLAs), and decides to switch to BSL, and has enough influence to make forks irrelevant.

I think Linux's model is the strongest: individual contributors retain copyright, and there are enough individual copyright holders to make relicensing insanely difficult. Coupled with the project's pace (and the pace at which they change the internal APIs) it basically provides such a guarantee. Most projects however are less successful and the users/downstream developers can't count on momentum as the safeguard.

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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by iudqnolq on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @11:08AM (#38365515)
A project could always be abandoned, there's no way to guarantee perpetual labor on your behalf.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by falcor84 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:06PM (#38366461)
What does this have to do with the preceding argument? Yes, the company could abandon the project, but the concern here is about them taking all the previous work (including volunteer contributions) and proceeding with a more restrictive commercial license; that's what we want to prevent.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by asalahli on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:08PM (#38366515)
> the concern here is about them taking all the previous work

Not unless they retroactively change the license on said previous work, which I'm pretty sure they cannot.

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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by falcor84 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:47PM (#38367107)
I haven't looked into GameMaker's license specifically, but many projects require a copyright assignment as part of their contributor license agreement.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by zem on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @01:46PM (#38368153)
that allows relicensing of the combined work moving forward, not retroactive relicensing of already released code.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by falcor84 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @05:27PM (#38371330)
That's indeed what I meant, apologies if I was unclear.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by josephcsible on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:10PM (#38366527)
Nobody wants to guarantee perpetual future labor. The guarantee we want is that if there's future labor, then we want the fruits of it to remain FOSS.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by rollcat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:10PM (#38366537)
The concern is not about free labor, the concern is that the product I'm building might get killed by vendor deciding to just fuck me over. Whether the software is free (as in beer or freedom) or not is a secondary concern - I'm merely noting that even a license as strong as AGPL is not a guarantee that I won't get fucked.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by OkayPhysicist on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @02:50PM (#38369059)
It is, though? All that is required is that you're allowed to maintain your own fork. Which is guaranteed to you, in perpetuity, by the AGPL.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by rollcat on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:07PM (#38372538)
How's Linux 2.6 going?
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by Longlius on Friday December 01, 2023 @11:28AM (#38488577)
Still working fine? You can run Linux 2.6 just fine on the hardware it supports and even backport newer features you want.
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Re:GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have... by EarlKing on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @01:17PM (#38367642)
There is. It's called Pay The Author. If you don't have a bare license conditioned on someone's pinky promise, but rather you pay the author and thereby perfect that promise into an actual, enforceable contract, then when someone attempts a rug-pull you can actually file suit to enforce your legal rights. Simple as.
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