@bonkmaykr So I was reading your blogpost on your commitment to ethical business practices and I thought that I could make some suggestions:
>Publishers eventually give up and move onto the next money printer. I'm a huge WipEout fan, but SCEI doesn't make those anymore...a game series dies and it's legacy entries are all that's left
To prevent a franchise from dying, the best thing to do (imo) is to release the characters, settings, lore, etc under the public domain or to have a very lax fan-game policy where even commercial games are allowed (think Touhou). If one thing is to be "open-source", I think the franchise itself should be the one.
>Unfortunately, our early releases will still be proprietary for a limited period of time. There is sadly an increasing number of small shovelware publishers under fake names that recycle software from Git repositories or dump bytecode from projects and repackage them to sell for a quick cash grab, without any of the rights you ought to have.
You can simply have the code be open while having the assets being proprietary. Anyone using your code but with different assets would effectively have a different game all together.
If you are concerned about shady forks destroying your reputation, the 3-clause BSD license prohibits products from claiming that you endorse them and the zlib license requires that all modified copies to be plainly marked as such. To prove that the original code came from you, you can use pre-release builds along with Git commit time-stamps as proof.
@bonkmaykr
>especially if they're outside of US jurisdiction.
The vast majority of countries on Earth have signed the Berne Convention, meaning that your copyright is automatically recognized internationally, outside of a few third-world countries. Anyone getting way with violating your copyright has to be either living in one of those countries, remaining relatively obscure, or practicing good OPSEC.
Though I do understand that delayed open-source might be the best option, but I am reminded of Notch promising to open-source Minecraft and he instead sold it to Microsoft.
You can simply have the code be open while having the assets being proprietary. Anyone using your code but with different assets would effectively have a different game all together.
Thanks for the feedback, and this is already the plan but the only thing really stopping us is that often times something being illegal to do is not enough of a deterrent. So I would prefer to go that route when we are steady enough to take on that risk without concern. The assets might be our IP, but it is still trivially easy for a bootlegger to recycle them for a profit and walk away with the money, especially if they're outside of US jurisdiction.