Moving and New Job

Well, what else to say but "congratulations" to you two!

I hope NCsoft will allow a lot of the stuff developed at their offices to be included into jME.

Even if part of it might stay closed source and obscured byte code only.

Great thing! Congratulations to you! jME is a great work!



Here in Italy nobody believed that was possible to develop a fast 3D engine with Java… (stupid and absolute secticism)! Instead you demonstrated that it can be possible.



You deserve this chance!



Good luck!



(Sorry for my English).

Good luck and godspeed to You guys

mojo: is there any chance that the licensing of jme changes under the given circumstances? i hope this is not the case. and i also hope the comunity will still be able to contribute.

To change the licensing from GPL/LGPL to a closed source/commercial license every contributer would have to accept the change or the code must be removed so in general this is more than unlikely. The GNU public license protects the code being open (or free as it was called) so that it cannot easily be closed. Not that I won't trust the developpers but the license helps the community in this regard.



The worst thing that might happen to an Open Source project is that it is no longer maintained but in the case of jME most probably it will be used by individuals and a commercial company and it will benefit from different aims.



I wish you luck with your new jobs and also your employer all the best and that their jME based projects succeed as we will benefit as well.

Galun, jME has never been under an LGPL or GPL. jME has a "new BSD" style license. That means any company or individual can take the source and do what they want with it. It's up to them if they want to contribute back or not. While copyright holders could decide to license their code under different terms as well, that's not really needed in this case.



The current license however, can not be revoked. Any jME sources you have on your computer right now will stay under the same license, wether any of the people who wrote it like it or not. Note that some of the libraries jME can use (most notably sound related) are under a different license. LWJGL is under the same type of license however.

Oops. I messed the license with another library, my bad. But anyway if it stays open it's fine  :wink:

are you saying i could copy the jme source, add some stuff and publish it as my own engine?

Yes.



You're not allowed to change any of the headings in the source code files, and still you can't claim that you wrote code yourself, that you didn't write (you can't claim copyright over it). However, you're not under any obligation to release the source code either, modified or not.



The only thing you're obliged to do is reproduce the license and copyright notice that is included in each jME file (whether you keep this in source form, or put it somewhere with your binary build is up to you). That license covers only the original work that you based your derative work on, you can choose yourself how to license any changes to it, or any work that uses jME and/or the changes made to it.

so NCsoft theoretically could do that, taking mojo away from us.

They could do that, and many companies do. A good example is ODE (which is LGPL/BSD) which is used in many games, in a heavily modified form.



But without having chosen such a license, Mark might never have gotten this chance anyway. The freedom this license brings, is very attractive for companies like NCsoft. Eg. let's say they've developed some kind of super-duper algorithm in house that they don't want to share with anyone. Under this license, they could still use this in their engine without revealing any of that code, and still contribute other additions and bug fixes to the engine. Maybe at some later point they'll decide to release this special feature to the community after all.



If jME was LGPL licensed like eg. Ogre3D, NCsoft would be required to give up such changes (if they want to release their game that uses it). And let's be honest, that can scare away companies.



So could NCsoft choose to hurt the community by hiring it's best programmers and not releasing any of the changes? Sure, but I doubt that's in their advantage in the end. I hope they don't think that either.



Could one, or some of us, take a snapshot of

I don't think we have anything to worry about.  I believe the main reason jME is as powerful as it is has to do with community support.  I think NCSoft would be shooting themselves in the feet if they were to destroy that aspect.  The beauty of having it still free and open-source is that there's hundreds of us continuing to add features and stability checking for free. :)  The only reason they might want to change that is if they wanted to license the engine out to those hundreds of people and though in the future that might be possible, I don't see enough profit coming from that yet (as there's still very few games that are making money using jME as their engine) to make it worth the loss of so much support.



Besides, even if the worst thing that could happen happens and jME is turned into a commercial product that starts being sold by NCSoft we either have to decide to buy licenses or branch this project and continue on without the assistance of Mojo and Renanse.  I seriously doubt that would ever need to happen.



darkfrog

I wouldn't worry too heavily. Basically, as I stated above, they have said they are willing to contribute back, but features must be evaluated to make sure that they are something they are willing to give up control of. Bug fixes, etc will be put in.



Of course they might decide to buy the rights to jME giving me $100,000,000… in which case screw you all!!! :slight_smile:



Seriously, there probably won't be that big of a change. The largest difference will be us no longer building features as defined in the features list, but what we need for the game.

Mojo,



If they do offer the $100mil do you think I could borrow like 50 bucks? :o



darkfrog

jME has so much community support that I am confident it will keep moving forward no matter what.  That said, I think we both plan to stay very involved in the community for a long long time.  If anything, I'm hoping that this new job will lend even more cred to jME as a whole and serve to move it in a direction that is attractive and useful for everyone.

Congrats and good luck making real games  :D, well its a usual result of a decent open source project.

I really hope JME would remain BSD licensed. At least till the 0.9 (the current) version. I have spent so much time to project a game based on this library (and it is far from end) that a change of licence could make me slide dead line far beyond, for developing a new framework based on LWJGL that preserve compatibility with JME.



A really bad situation for me if it would happen.



My project is something personal/independent but I hope some day I would earn something from it… and that day I would be happy to pay, if necessary, or also donate for such a great library but now I have no possibility to do that so…

As already explained, once code is out under the BSD license, it can't be revoked. So any code you have in your hands right now, with that license on top, you're free to use under that license, and give to others too. Even if NCsoft pays mojo $100.000.000

Thanks for the explanation…



The argument of Open Source licenses is really not clear to me. I have read many… many times all the GPL, LGPL and BSD (I have to choose wich one to use for a project of mine) but I am not able to understand wich is the best for me. I also wrote to FSF to get some explanation but they answered me to conctact some lawyer for further explanations or to pay them for a consultation.



Eh, eh I am non exactly an expert of licenses and contracts  :smiley:



Moreover some time is hard for me to tranlaste/understand what you say in English in this (and not only this) forum. So probably, even if you have already explained it, I have not understand it… sorry.