If you use my snippet, I want your game. If you don’t agree, then you can’t use my snippet. The purpose of the GPL is simply to prevent people who don’t share from benefitting from people who do, which I think is pretty fair.
Then I need to include a snippet of GPL’ed code for any reason
A snippet? Surely you don’t need to include a snippet of someone else’s labor.
all that work now no longer belongs to me
It does belong to you. You still own the copyright of the work. You can still license it however you want, you just also need to make it available under the GPL.
Again, using GPL’d code does not remove your ownership of the code you wrote. Using other people’s code in general does remove your exclusivity of ownership, regardless of license, since the code other people wrote belongs to them.
Essentially GPL removes a large way to gain money.
What you are saying is you should be entitled to make money off of someone else’s work. If you want to make money on something, you may be required to do the work yourself.
Individuals writing software and selling licenses for is not, in the grand scheme of things, a “large way” to get money. The vast majority of money made from writing software is programmers being paid to write software for someone else who will own the license. Software written under “permissive” licenses is by and large used to create wealth for the owning class, not individual programmers.
it removes my exclusivity of ownership over my own code.
Your statement is false. It does not remove or diminish your exclusivity of ownership over your own code. That’s just not how copyright works. I don’t know how else to put it.
I’d gladly pay them a smaller fee
If I ever wrote code you wanted to use in a game you wanted to sell, and you reached out to me, I’d just let you use the code under a different license for free. My main concern is that corporations would freeload off my work. Some people wouldn’t even do it for any fee. I think that’s silly, but they get to set the terms of how we use their code.
selling copies of my software is largely how I make money
That’s great! You are part of a tiny group of people who manage to make money this way, and that’s no small accomplishment. More power to you, and I wish you more success. If you feel comfortable revealing it here, what game(s) do you sell?
Not exactly. For example, you can’t make the whole thing, GPL snippet included, available under MIT. You can only license your own contribution however you want (in addition to GPL).
You still own the code you release under GPL. the restriction you are describing is actually caused by the non-copyleft licences you claim to prefer. If you choose to use MIT, you are limiting which libraries you can use. If you had picked GPL to begin with, you can use any library.
If the exclusive ownership of something, in order to sell it, is the primary choice driving factor of a project. Then you should just make it proprietary. Anything else would limit your margins, since someone else can just fork your project, change it and make it proprietary themselves. A dual license is sometimes used in this case as well.
That seems a somewhat contrived example. Yes, it can theoretically happen - but in practice it would happen with a library, and most libraries are LGPL (or more permissive) anyway. By contrast, there have been plenty of stories lately of people who wrote MIT/BSD software, and then got upset when companies just took the code to add in their products, without offering much support in return.
Also, there’s a certain irony in saying what essentially amounts to, “Please license your code more permissively, because I want to license mine more restrictively”.
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If you use my snippet, I want your game. If you don’t agree, then you can’t use my snippet. The purpose of the GPL is simply to prevent people who don’t share from benefitting from people who do, which I think is pretty fair.
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A snippet? Surely you don’t need to include a snippet of someone else’s labor.
It does belong to you. You still own the copyright of the work. You can still license it however you want, you just also need to make it available under the GPL.
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Again, using GPL’d code does not remove your ownership of the code you wrote. Using other people’s code in general does remove your exclusivity of ownership, regardless of license, since the code other people wrote belongs to them.
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Your statement is false. It does not remove or diminish your exclusivity of ownership over your own code. That’s just not how copyright works. I don’t know how else to put it.
If I ever wrote code you wanted to use in a game you wanted to sell, and you reached out to me, I’d just let you use the code under a different license for free. My main concern is that corporations would freeload off my work. Some people wouldn’t even do it for any fee. I think that’s silly, but they get to set the terms of how we use their code.
That’s great! You are part of a tiny group of people who manage to make money this way, and that’s no small accomplishment. More power to you, and I wish you more success. If you feel comfortable revealing it here, what game(s) do you sell?
Not exactly. For example, you can’t make the whole thing, GPL snippet included, available under MIT. You can only license your own contribution however you want (in addition to GPL).
Yes, you don’t own the thing you didn’t make.
You still own the code you release under GPL. the restriction you are describing is actually caused by the non-copyleft licences you claim to prefer. If you choose to use MIT, you are limiting which libraries you can use. If you had picked GPL to begin with, you can use any library.
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If the exclusive ownership of something, in order to sell it, is the primary choice driving factor of a project. Then you should just make it proprietary. Anything else would limit your margins, since someone else can just fork your project, change it and make it proprietary themselves. A dual license is sometimes used in this case as well.
You can sell GPL licensed software. You don’t have to publish the source code publicly online.
That seems a somewhat contrived example. Yes, it can theoretically happen - but in practice it would happen with a library, and most libraries are LGPL (or more permissive) anyway. By contrast, there have been plenty of stories lately of people who wrote MIT/BSD software, and then got upset when companies just took the code to add in their products, without offering much support in return.
Also, there’s a certain irony in saying what essentially amounts to, “Please license your code more permissively, because I want to license mine more restrictively”.
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