Should I choose MIT or BSD 3-Clause for my engine? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by ArsFireside@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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Hello everyone.

I'm developing an open-source visual novel engine. And I'm struggling to choose between the two licenses: MIT and BSD 3-Clause. I wasn't much about licenses until this moment, so I have to ask someone else. Which one should I pick and why, if someone knows?

Thank you in advance.

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[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 months ago

To prevent it getting lost i want to point this out in its own top-level comment:

Keep in mind that as the copyright holder you can publish your code under as many licenses as you wish, and charge for whichever licenses you wish.
You could publish it for free under AGPL, charge a smaller sum for developers who want/need a more permissive license like BSD 3-clause, and charge out the ass for a full on proprietary license.

Do note though that you'd have to think about how to handle contributions, as that will be copyright of the respective authors and thus you can't just merrily go and change the license of their contributions. You'd have to ask them to sign a Contributor License Agreement or just straight up manage the codebases separately (which is a little bit of a mess).