Hi I am working on a pretty large gamedevelopment library which features quite a few tools to speed up development times. My plan is it to release the library to the public for educational purposes, when I think its solid and tested enough. If someone wishes to use it for a commercial game project I would like to charge a little fee, depending on the project scale, for the time I invested into writing the library and because I plan to use it in my own projects that might or might not become commercial ones So I am looking for a license that allows me to charge a fee and makes the library available for non profit projects or educational purposes Some notes on the library: It includes the following: - a 3d math library with vector and matrix classes compatible with D3D and OpenGL - a quaternion implementation - a FPS(First-Person-Shooter) camera class with quaternions - a image loading class which supports several image times(TGA, BMP, RAW) and a custom image format - a image processing functionality(e.g.: mip map generation) - shader definition implementation - bitpacking class - cross platform sockets implementation for(Linux, Windows) - STL compatible pool allocator - perlin noise implementation - a novodex SDK, OpenGL and D3D compatible mesh class with derivations for terrain and usual triangle meshes - a texture manager - a bunch of templated classes such as different singleton types - maybe a cross platform multithreading implementation this is only the work that is nearly completed I plan to enhance the library more and more depending on what I will need my future programming projects Thx in advance

I think the LGPL might be good for you.

Check out the LGPL Wikipedia page also.

thx
i have read the lgpl and some other licenses

i think i will reread all to completely understand
til now theres nothing i really favor they are all pretty restrictive

If none of them suit you get a lawyer to write one that does.

I don t want to spend a few hundret dollars for such a license

Sadly we don't often find the one perfectly exact thing we want ... for free. Ultimately you will most likely have to choose between something that is available free, but which is too restrictive/not perfect, or paying for a lawyer to make something that is perfect for you.

Can't he just pick one of the existent licenses and change the (few) points that he wants to?

the GNU and the LGPL forbid the manipulation of their license

maybe one of my professors at the uni knows some licenses that fit my purposes

Quote: Original post by Basiror
the GNU and the LGPL forbid the manipulation of their license

I meant something like:

The Basiror License!

- You can...
- You can't...
- Everything else (unless it conflicts with the stated above) is just like the LGPL

Don't know if this is manipulation. As I see it, it's a MOD. lol

Quote: Original post by Basiror
the GNU and the LGPL forbid the manipulation of their license

maybe one of my professors at the uni knows some licenses that fit my purposes

That isn't true. You can take the GPL or LGPL and modify it to your hearts content, so long as you change the name of the license to something else so there is no confusion between your new license and GPL/LGPL.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

Are you looking to charge a fee for people to use your library commercially, but allow non-commercial or educational use for free? I'm sure there will be a license out there that covers this case, although it would be incomptable with the GPL, but then if open source isn't your goal, that shouldn't matter.

As the poster above suggested, you can always create your own license. I'm certain I've seen other licenses on mudlibs and opensource projects that were free to use for non-commercial purposes only, find one of those and modify it.