It’s MIT licensed, so there’s nothing stopping someone from getting it, making major changes, and releasing it as proprietary software for consoles and make a lot of money in the process.
This is why I’m always sad when I see a project opening as MIT instead of GPL.
Not to be picky, but the GPL would not stop someone "making major changes, and releasing it as proprietary software for consoles and make a lot of money in the process."
The only difference is that they would be obligated to release the source code. Given that the list of folk who can compile for consoles is very limited, this would not be an existential burden for them.
Indeed, even if they targeted a common development platform, like a PC or Mac, they would still be able to offer lots of value, and easily sell copies if there was a market for that. The vast majority of players would happily pay $49 for a compiled version of the game rather than go to the effort of compiling themselves.
In other words, the GPL and MIT licenses are orthogonal to making money - making money selling compiled GPL programs is not hard - assuming the program has some value to someone.
> the GPL would not stop someone "making major changes, and releasing it as proprietary software for consoles and make a lot of money in the process.""
It absolutely would stop anyone from releasing it as proprietary software. You cannot have GPL'ed proprietary software. You can sell GPL code, you can use it in proprietary platforms, but by definition the software itself cannot be proprietary. If it's GPL'ed, other people can sell it, modify it, distribute it, and use it for their own purposes.
I get that, hence me saying "they would be obligated to release the source code." My point is that has little or no effect on the actual sales of the program (since the parent post was primarily about money.)
There are reasons to prefer GPL over MIT, and other reasons to prefer MIT over GPL, but money isn't one of them...
I understood the key word was "proprietary" in the comment you refer to, with the side effect of also "making lots of money". I might have misunderstood.
You absolutely cannot ship GPL code on a console. The NDA license you sign with MS, sony, nintendo for their APIs are fundamentally incompatible with the GPL and prohibit code release.
Plus, you can open source the code but leave the textures, models, maps, whatever else as proprietary. iD software already did this with the source code of Doom, you can read it but unless you want to reskin the whole game, it's entirely unplayable.
it doesn't matter that much in case of games, because the code is not very useful without assets. famously multiple quakes were released as GPL software and it didn't really cost id software anything in lost sales. art and levels were NOT released as GPL.
i'd say MIT license wouldn't impact the sales outcome at all.
In my opinion (opinion, so I could be wrong), MIT and friends offer more freedom. I have a strong aversion to the concept of copyleft and usually try to avoid it for fear of "tainting" anything I touch after. In principle, where it makes sense, I rather like the idea of the sort of freedom claimed by GPL advocates but in practice I prefer to allow people to do whatever they want.
To answer your questions, no, I don't intend (or tend, for that matter) to takes modified versions without corresponding source code. It's not about what I do it's about what they say I can and can't do.
I don't know why an author should. I'm not spending any time agonizing over what they should be doing. I don't understand why you threw that second half of the sentence in there as if the two are necessarily linked.
>This is why I’m always sad when I see a project opening as MIT instead of GPL.
Counterpoint, many companies won't allow GPL software even if eventually it'd be open sourced again.
I personally wouldn't mind a for sale version of this game updated to run on my phone. Even if it's 15$ or so. Without a profit motive the number of people who would bother to continue development is much lower.
Your also free to fork it , make the ultimate version and GPL it
This is why I’m always sad when I see a project opening as MIT instead of GPL.