Commercial license

[lok]

Hi Spring guys,

My team has been working on an RTS game that we wish to go commercial with. I purchased another engine at 500 usd that so far I am not satisfied with. I checked the wiki and didn't get a clear answer on wither the Spring engine can be purchased for commercial use, or If its free for commercial use. It seems to have many of the desired features that my programmers are working on now already in it and I wouldn't mind switching now before we've spent to much time on the other SDK.

Thanks for your time.

-LOK

[Warlord Zsinj]

My understanding is that it is free for commercial use, as long as you provide the engine to your users in an open source manner. Any content you bring to Spring that is your own can be closed-source, so long as you don't reuse anyone else's work that has been licensed with an open-share style license such as CC or GPL.

Noone's really used Spring commercially before, so it's unclear whether things such as reliance on GPL things would equally make your code GPL (and therefore not really suitable for commercial use), so the water's a bit murky there, but the general understanding, as far as I'm aware, is that yes, you can use Spring commercially, but just be aware of the implications of the GNU / GPL license, as well as the use of other people's work under similar licensing schemes.

[Argh]

Spring, the game engine itself, is GPL, and so is the base content associated with it.

Game code / content, can be private.

Spring is not currently designed to allow for games with any source protection whatsoever, however. The way games are packed would allow people to pirate your games, or at least pillage the good bits, ridiculously easy.

If you guys like what the engine can do otherwise, after looking it over, then you'd have to deal with that issue in some way.

One last note. Spring does not support an IK format of any kind at this time. We use a programming language called COB to animate with. It's actually pretty cool, but it's very limiting in some respects- Spring cannot do vertex-deformation animations yet. It's the biggest single issue in terms of modern format areas that's currently missing, and it'd take a lot of work to implement.

If you build an IK format for use in Spring, it will require engine changes, and thus be GPL. Needless to say, there are plenty of people who'd love that, and you'd probably get a lot of help, if you had coders willing to, say, port one of the GPL formats from Quake engines or whatever.

[AF]

Any changes you make to the engine that get included in your eventual release, would have to be made available in accordance with GPL, the same with the AI projects.

However there's nothing stopping you from building and selling an RTS with the spring engine.

It would also be useful if you did use spring to give feedback on issues you have and suggestions on how to make life easier, so that we can improve the engine and possibly help you out in places.

[lok]

Well that sounds great guys. Our intentions are to produce a great RTS for sale under 10 usd, with open source for the community to take and run with, to allow the freedom to create your own races. The best will be included into our universe so that as long as the community is interested, it will be ever expanding. Such inspirations as shattered galaxy and total annihilation have influenced us greatly and its a shame that we didn't think of spring sooner. I'll update soon on wither we decide to switch gears or to continue with building game classes for our graphics engine. Thanks again for the quick response!

[SwiftSpear]

You can sell games made under spring under certain conditions.

A: Any code changes made to the engine must be rereleased under GPL
B: People buying the game know they can/where they can get a copy of the source code

You're not obligated to release any of your art content or art sources for public use or distribution, and you retain copyright over all your art resources, so you still have full legal recourse if, for example, springers are distributing your project without legal purchases (keep in mind we won't play police for you though, at least not any more then we would for a mod that's being abused).

IMO spring makes a decent candidate for comercial use. Pretty much anything can be done with spring through lua... but there is some brain work to be done before hand to ensure that what you want your project to do is going to be something spring is good at.

[malric]

Well that sounds great guys. Our intentions are to produce a great RTS for sale under 10 usd, with open source for the community to take and run with, to allow the freedom to create your own races.

Good luck. Just my personal opinion: at this point, spring fits perfectly your description... . And you should consider that time will pass and Spring will also become better .

[smoth]

if you guys need some free explosion sprites let me know. I can fire you them as long as you guys toss me a shout in the credits so people do not think I stole them from you.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I need some free explosion sprites >_>

[smoth]

I already offered them, so >_> back at you. Remember, I was in chat with gnomre but all conversations do not happen in sws channel. I have so help to lend s44 first, nemo and I have a prior arrangement. After that I was going to help sws a bit.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Nemo is really working for IW, he just doesn't know it yet. So really you'd cut out the middle man if you just skipped S44 and came straight to IW.

[FLOZi]

Lies and slander.