License for an arcade game

[Chuck Swiger]

On May 18, 2008, at 7:13 AM, Pimm Hogeling wrote:
> To me, this also means that others shouldn't be able to use
> the code in other works that are not open (such as commercial closed
> source projects). I have read that since GPL code can only be used in
> other GPL projects it will always remain open, so that sounds good to
> me.

Given the criteria you've listed, the GPL is the most common choice to  
prevent reuse with closed-source projects.  Dual-licensing a project  
is normally done to resolve a specific license compatibility problem,  
and should be avoided without a decent reason.

However, if you want to use code or resources from other projects, and  
redistribute that combination to users, then using the GPL restricts  
you to only using other resources which are GPL-miscible.  That is  
generally not a big concern, as most open source software is either  
under the GPL/LGPL or is under a GPL-miscible license (ie, BSD, MIT,  
MPL, others).

> Second, the game is obviously not only code. It will also contain
> graphics, sounds and maybe other resources. How should they be
> licensed? Let's say I license the code as MPL 1.1/GPL 3, does this
> mean the game (package) can only contain material (other than code,
> that is) with a certain license? Could a Creative Commons license do
> the trick?

Most people license graphic resources, sounds, etc under the same  
terms as the code.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck