Licensing question, please help
Thursday, November 6, 2014 - 20:09
I'm working on a game that has a client and server components. If I use, say, CC-BY-SA gfx in the client,
do I need to share the client code, server code, neither or both? Thanks!
I'm working on a game that has a client and server components. If I use, say, CC-BY-SA gfx in the client,
do I need to share the client code, server code, neither or both? Thanks!
Using art assets under Creative Commons licenses doesn't affect your code at all, only the assets themselves. Therefore, neither.
"Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software." (emphasis added) https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_...
If you're using the art in a game, would you have to make the art assets available on your website or something? or maybe put in another folder included with the game? kinda confused about that.
It depends on how your game is built. If your art assets are packaged as such in the game archive, people can trivially extract them after downloading. If they're stored on a server and loaded dynamically, providing a separate download might be a good idea. The same goes if your game uses some sort of unusual custom format for internal purposes. (See Machinarium, where the soundtrack is offered as an MP3 archive for just this reason.) And in either case you should link to the original source.
It's really neither very strict nor very complicated. Hope this helps.
Thanks that clears things up.