Under which license are we going to release our demos and the openwar engine?
We're going to be open source, but there are different open source licenses. I described the two that I think are interesting for us:
GPLGeneral Public License.
This is the best know license of them all. Most open source applications are released under this license.
Basicly this means that everybody can see and adjust the source code as they wish and commercial projects can't use software that's released under the GPL.
See the wikipedia page for a good description and more links to other pages.
GPL on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GplLGPLLesser General Public License.
As the name suggests the LGPL is based on the GPL. Companies can use software that is licensed as LGPL in their commercial projects. Everybody is still able to see and adept the source code. However if the LGPL code is changed and used in a commercial project, then the new user is forced to share the changes he has made to the LGPL code with the community.
There a quite a few engines releases under the LGPL. This license has several benefits over the GPL license.
See the wikipedia page for a good description and more links to other pages.
LGPL on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGPLThere are more licenses available, but I think the above 2 are the most important for us. None the less, here are some links to the wikipedia pages of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licensehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License