Use an open source license

[TrashMacNugget]

In the README you encourage people to contribute. However, under the current license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives), they are actually not allowed to; the license says they may not make changes. Would you consider using an open source license? ChooseALicense.com explains some of the choices in simple terms. I'll go over two common options.

There's MIT, which basically means anyone can do absolutely anything as long as they give you credit. This is good if you want something simple that you don't have to think about, and you don't really care if people make versions where they don't share.

Then there's GPLv3, which means people can make changes and contribute to the project, but they can't take any of the permissions away (i.e. they have to let everyone else do the things they were allowed to do, like make changes). This makes sure the code stays open.

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If you want to use GPLv3, it's pretty simple. You can add this text to your project description:

Copyright (C) 2018 atom0s

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

[atom0s]

At this time I do not have plans to change the license due to code theft on various skid sites. I have some plans for a newer version of this though with a bit more scalability in the future though that may include a full rewrite. If that does take place I may look into other licenses, but the license I chose was on purpose.

I welcome and allow commits back to the base project here though as mentioned in the 'No-Derivatives' clause of the license I picked:

 *   No-Derivatives - If you remix, transform, or build upon the material (Steamless), you may not distribute the
 *                    modified material. You are, however, allowed to submit the modified works back to the original
 *                    Steamless project in attempt to have it added to the original project.

[atom0s]

I will leave this open though to allow more discussion on the topic of a different license. Given the nature around projects like this, the source is often stolen or used without proper credits. I tend to stay away from open source altogether because of this as the game hacking and reversing scenes have become full of copy pasters. Everyone who downloads Visual Studio and compiles someone elses code feels like they earn the title 'programmer' and then change 1-2 lines of stuff and rename it and feel its their own.

I extremely dislike this new era of kids entering the fields around things like this so I tend to stay away from sharing things anymore or making them open source. Steamless was an exception I made because I felt this is something that can be expanded on vastly and be driven by community development and updates, but sadly the opposite happened and I saw my code land up in other peoples projects with 0 credit or "scene" groups using my project to unpack their leaks and claim they removed it manually.

Open source has lost its value and meaning for me personally but I do want to keep this project open source for the educational purposes and community assistance when I do not have the time to work on the newer versions of the stub, or to support missing features or older versions I do not currently support.

[Sewer56]

 *   No-Derivatives - If you remix, transform, or build upon the material (Steamless), you may not distribute the
 *                    modified material. You are, however, allowed to submit the modified works back to the original
 *                    Steamless project in attempt to have it added to the original project.

Just a small tidbit that hasn't been brought up yet.

Under this clause, how are you expected to submit the modified works back?
Would I have to email you or send it privately in some other manner?

Theoretically, if you make a fork to the project, the moment you commit to the fork and push it upstream you violate the license.

But in order to submit a pull request on Github, you do require to use a public fork of the project, which you cannot do because making any changes to it violates the license as the fork is public.

Everyone who downloads Visual Studio and compiles someone elses code feels like they earn the title 'programmer' and then change 1-2 lines of stuff and rename it and feel its their own.

I share my condolences. I don't specifically hang around the general/popular game hacking & modding scenes (only small, very specialized ones) but even I've seen this happen time and time again on popular sites.

I'm lucky myself in that the communities are active in, and those that I run are very good when it comes to attribution, happily listing anyone who provided any sort of help or the tools used to create hack/mod X.

I'm actually asking because I was thinking if I could make myself some time in life, I'd consider making a library version of Steamless. This would make solving issue #14 considerably easier and I suppose reusing in other projects.

[atom0s]

Sorry I missed your response to this, never got an email and just noticed it when someone reported an issue earlier.

Right now submissions to the project can be done privately on my website or email. However, I do want to say even with the license, I do give the following permission as the license holder of the project:

• You may fork Steamless and modify it with the purpose of submitting back the changes to the main project via a pull request. Modified forks may not be used outside of the license terms though except for this purpose.

Going forward with the project I do have a handful of things planned when I have the time. Which include:

• A new license that is a bit less overkill but still focuses on keeping Steamless out of copy paste projects or for-profit things. (Probably something like GNU GPL v3 with the requirement of being open source for using Steamless' code.)
• Breaking up the project into parts where the libraries are not heavily tied into the UI in any manner.
• Created a much more optimized UI app for Steamless including the following:
  • Full command line support.
  • Better UI layout and features for some expanded information. (Think of a tool like CE Explorer for the file info about the stub etc.)
  • Better error messages and other detailed information for non-experienced users to better report problems.

Right now my issue is lack of time due to other projects on my plate. Hopefully I can get things sorted out this year and get some time invested into this again as I enjoy working on it.

Thanks for the feedback on the license everyone. :) Still leaving this open for any other discussions regarding it.

[theclashingfritz]

I think the worst part about this is atom0s is right about the skid thing, which is why i'm always in small communities. I'll respect his decision regardless. But i would say having it open source is enough for me, But having other people being able to contribute is always a plus.

[Sewer56]

Not directly related to the topic at hand, but thank you for the work.

This project is invaluable for video game modding on a large scale; so I do want to thank you for the contribution.

When I last commented here, I was a student, without any sort of means of income. But now, that's no longer the case anymore. While I still have some debts to pay, I threw a $100 (USD) donation.

I know it's not much, but there are a lot of projects I want to give back to, so this will have to do for now.

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(Note: I comment here as I couldn't with the donation.)