Title says all, I would like to publish my game under a Creative Commons license. What licenses can I use for a game if any?
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2How would others use and adapt your game and republish it? Also, What licenses can I use for a game if any? is too broad. Why would you do that? What's your main goal in doing so? – Vaillancourt Nov 16 '19 at 02:24
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Well, you can do that. You can use any license you want for your game. But Creative Commons does not recommend it. The reason is that there are a lot of licenses available which were written specifically for software. These licenses have the same basic intentions as CC licenses, but have a wording and include clauses which are much more appropriate for this particular use-case. Here are a few licenses I would recommend as alternatives for CC licenses (but please note that I am not a lawyer):
- CC-BY-SA: GNU GPL. If you have a gameserver, you might want to consider licensing it under GNU AGPL.
- CC-BY: MIT, one of the BSD licenses, or if you like it wordy Apache License.
- CC-0: The Unlicense (not to be confused with no license at all, which means you reserve all rights), and my personal favorite software license, the WTFPL
But with games in particular there is the problem that usually about half the work are art assets which are not appropriately covered by software licenses. We ran into that problem once during an open source project licensed under GPL when people started to wonder what the "sourcecode" of a spritesheet is supposed to be.
A good solution can be to separate the programming of the game from the art assets. You can license the programming under a software license and the assets under a Creative Commons license.
Philipp
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1Unfortunately there are no well-established and freely usable software licenses I know which are equivalent to CC-BY-NC (free for non-commercial use) or CC-BY-ND (free to distribute without changes). If you know one, feel free to comment. – Philipp Nov 16 '19 at 12:00
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Apparantly since video games count as software I can't put a CC license on them.
Ateur Games
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1What leads you to this conclusion? While the Creative Commons generally recommends software-specific licences to cover the specific needs of that form, they do mention in that same guide that CC0 is acceptable for software, and CC-BY-SA-4.0 can cover situations where the line between the software and content is unclear. So there is not a blanket prohibition on using CC licences for software. It's just a consideration of what licence best serves your objectives. – DMGregory Nov 16 '19 at 02:59