Batch game and legal help

[Gexgekko]

Hi Roguetemple community!
First of all, thanks for reading this bothering/boring/bad-written post and sorry if it's not the place for it ( hopefully, it is, but I'm not sure so I'm a bit scared while writting this). Also sorry for my bad spelling, English is not my mothertongue so it's a bit hard for me to write...

Ok, here I go:

I'm making a text-based role playing adventure with a strange humour (think of simon the sorcerer, diskworld, monkey island). The adventure has turn-based combat, roguelikish decisions (with a single option you choose wrong, the whole world could end in a explosion, or in a flower rain, or end just for your neighbour...). I'm also trying (this feature is not really done yet) to add a map in ascii (like ADOM, AlienRL, etc). -If I succeed doing it, I will post the results here in roguetemple or whatever you want so everyone can enjoy this pointless adventure for free-

The point is I'm making the whole game in Batch, so is gonna be open source and I have no troubles with this, everyone should be free to play, modify, enhance, add new content, destroy the world, etc. but I'm scared that someone take my code, release it with a payment license or something like that and say I stole "his/her" code, so I'll be in troubles. I have no idea how to protect myself and my code from this and still let the players/modders see and modify the game. I thought licensing it as... GPL? I don't know the terms, but an open source license should work. Are licenses free for the one who makes the code? I mean, is this gonna cost me money? I have 0.00$ but I just wanna people enjoy my work... Could you help me giving me clues of what should I do?

Again, thanks a lot for reading and lots of thanks for helping

[rust]

I haven't looked at GPL that much, but you can consider using one of Creative Commons licenses. They allow you to customize which aspects are allowed and which aren't. Everything you have to do is choose a fitting license and mark that your work is licensed on its terms, be it with text or an appropriate icon.

[pat]

to be honest, I don't think you need to worry about it at all. A text roleplaying game is never going to make money and you are never going to be sued or anthing else.

[jlund3]

When you publish your work, you automatically retain all rights to that work. The licence gives other people permission to do certain things such as redistribution that they otherwise couldn't without breaching copyright. For software, adding a license is as simple as including the license with the source code. This is typically done by including a file called LICENSE or similar containing the text of your licenses along with the source. Another common practice is including a header in each source file which reiterates how the source code is licensed. There is no cost involved.

There are a variety of software licenses to choose from, including the GLP software license. I would recommend against using a Creative Commons license for software though, as there are licenses which more specifically tailored for software and source code (the Creative Commons FAQ echos this sentiment). Other good options include permissive licenses like the BSD licenses, or the Apache license which is a bit more modern.

Choosing a license depends entirely upon what restrictions you wish to leave in place for your users. Open source licenses generally give users freedom to use, modify and share the software. The main differences are on how the software can be shared. For example, the GPL requires that any changes made to the source be shared under the terms of the GPL (earning the GPL the reputation as a "viral" license). Other licenses like the BSD license are more permissive, and only insists that users retain the copyright notice when they share the software.

So which license do you choose? It is entirely up to you. I personally use the BSD license for my roguelike endeavors, as I don't really care how people use that code. If they wanna include a bit of it in their closed source money making app, so be it. If I were working on something a little more infrastructure-y like an OS kernel or something, I would want the entire community to benefit from any changes users make, so I would be more inclined to choose something like the GPL. In the end though, the advice pat gave is probably right - this is a smaller project in the grand scheme of things, so do a little bit of research on Wikipedia, choose something, stop worrying and start coding.

[guest509]

You are protected by copyright laws when you publish. If someone takes your stuff and tries to sell it they are violating your copyright and can be sued.

Also, don't worry about that. I've never heard of it happening with a hobby project, and even larger projects I cannot think of a good example. First make something bad ass.