Licensing Your Track/Car/Addon by Sunoco
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2010 4:50 am
The Problem
It has been a bit of a pet peeve of mine, that the vast majority of Generally addons have not been properly licensed. What I mean, is that people make cars and tracks, and save for a select few, don't actually say what people can and cannot do with their tracks and cars. This has led to problems in the past. Sometimes people would leave the forum, and their works would be lost to history after one of the many forum crashes. Nobody knew if it was in the authors interest that their works be shared amongst the community if for some reason, they were available and/or the files had been lost. To prevent such confusion, you should license your work upon release.
What?
To license a work, is, in a nutshell, to tell others what they can and cannot do with your work. To license your work, you can do any number of things. You can simply say what people are allowed to do with your file in your post, or you can use a premade license.
How?
There are several ways you can license your work. One way, is to simple state what the terms are for using your work. Let us say that you wanted people to be able to freely share your work with one another, but not to modify it; you could simply state that in your post.
Example->
You: Download my track. You can share it with others, and use it how you like, but you may not modify it.
This works well, but sometimes it can get tedious, especially if you are not one for writing. It is possible that you might forget something, or you might not be clear enough. A simple remedy for this is to use a premade license. There are a plethora of licenses available to choose from, and it is very easy to apply them to your work.
List of Licenses
Restrictive-> You will have to state your terms yourself. Typically, restrictive licenses are themselves heavily copyrighted. No worry though, because as described above, this is an easy process, and rarely will you need a formal license. (especially considering that we are talking about Generally tracks! )
Free->
Creative Commons: My personal favorite. You can use their license generator to generate a license for your work based on your own preferences. Very cool.
Very Free->
Most Free Software Licenses belong in this category, especially BSD/Apache style licenses. These essentially allow people to do whatever they want with your work, as long as they give you credit and in the case of the GPL, you must share the source code if you share the compiled work.
Obviously, this is not necessarily applicable to Generally tracks and cars, considering that they don't really have "source code".
Public Domain-> Means that you relinquish all copyright and all claims, and that people are free to do whatever they want with you work, including modifying, taking credit, and redistributing your work.
I would personally recommend that you use a Creative Commons license. The CC licenses are not made especially for software (and in fact can license everything from pictures to recipes), and are more varied and customizable than the other choices. Below I have included an example of how to license something with a Creative Commons License.
Example:
Click the image for the full license.
It has been a bit of a pet peeve of mine, that the vast majority of Generally addons have not been properly licensed. What I mean, is that people make cars and tracks, and save for a select few, don't actually say what people can and cannot do with their tracks and cars. This has led to problems in the past. Sometimes people would leave the forum, and their works would be lost to history after one of the many forum crashes. Nobody knew if it was in the authors interest that their works be shared amongst the community if for some reason, they were available and/or the files had been lost. To prevent such confusion, you should license your work upon release.
What?
To license a work, is, in a nutshell, to tell others what they can and cannot do with your work. To license your work, you can do any number of things. You can simply say what people are allowed to do with your file in your post, or you can use a premade license.
How?
There are several ways you can license your work. One way, is to simple state what the terms are for using your work. Let us say that you wanted people to be able to freely share your work with one another, but not to modify it; you could simply state that in your post.
Example->
You: Download my track. You can share it with others, and use it how you like, but you may not modify it.
This works well, but sometimes it can get tedious, especially if you are not one for writing. It is possible that you might forget something, or you might not be clear enough. A simple remedy for this is to use a premade license. There are a plethora of licenses available to choose from, and it is very easy to apply them to your work.
List of Licenses
Restrictive-> You will have to state your terms yourself. Typically, restrictive licenses are themselves heavily copyrighted. No worry though, because as described above, this is an easy process, and rarely will you need a formal license. (especially considering that we are talking about Generally tracks! )
Free->
Creative Commons: My personal favorite. You can use their license generator to generate a license for your work based on your own preferences. Very cool.
Very Free->
Most Free Software Licenses belong in this category, especially BSD/Apache style licenses. These essentially allow people to do whatever they want with your work, as long as they give you credit and in the case of the GPL, you must share the source code if you share the compiled work.
Obviously, this is not necessarily applicable to Generally tracks and cars, considering that they don't really have "source code".
Public Domain-> Means that you relinquish all copyright and all claims, and that people are free to do whatever they want with you work, including modifying, taking credit, and redistributing your work.
I would personally recommend that you use a Creative Commons license. The CC licenses are not made especially for software (and in fact can license everything from pictures to recipes), and are more varied and customizable than the other choices. Below I have included an example of how to license something with a Creative Commons License.
Example:
Click the image for the full license.