A question about licenses

[Dunrana]

I’m looking to release a mod (really a series of .cfg files) that use Kopernicus Planetary System Modifier to re-position some of the stock planets

.

I’m spectacularly uninformed on matters of licenses. Who, if anyone, do I need to contact for permission to bundle ModuleManager and Kopernicus in with my mod for release?

I’m thinking of releasing my mod under a creative commons license.

[rabidninjawombat]

I’m looking to release a mod (really a series of .cfg files) that use Kopernicus Planetary System Modifier to re-position some of the stock planets

.

I’m spectacularly uninformed on matters of licenses. Who, if anyone, do I need to contact for permission to bundle ModuleManager and Kopernicus in with my mod for release?

I’m thinking of releasing my mod under a creative commons license.

Both mods i believe are under the CC licence as well(i know ModuleManager is, may wanna double check Kopernicus) . So you dont need permission to bundle with your mod.

You do need to include attribution, as well as a copy of their respective licenses in your download.

Edited March 14, 2015 by rabidninjawombat

[Taki117]

I'm also fairly certain that if you redistribute their mods your mod must have the same license they do.

[Dunrana]

well the post about Kopernicus includes the statment

Planned features:

- Free software (LGPL) license

everything i can find about this (I'm not even sure i found anything about it) is in legal language that I can't make heads or tails of.

[NathanKell]

It is usually better to link to dependencies rather than bundling them. However, you are allowed to bundle things whose license don't match yours, on condition that (a) their license allows such bundling (any CC license or L/GPL or MIT/BSD does), and ( you include that license separately and follow its requirements (for example by clearly attributing the bundled work to the work's author in your OP and readme).

For example, you could release your cfgs with Module Manager and with Kopernicus, if you include obvious attribution in both cases, include their licenses, and include links to their source (for example, their threads here which have the source). You can choose whatever license you like for your own work--even all rights reserved--as long as you make clear what is not your own work and what license(s) that's under.

[Dunrana]

Thank You! i was beginning to wonder if it was even possible to figure out these licenses.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

For CC and (L)GPL licenses, it's best to go straight to the source for information. In this case, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html

In general, if you have a background in engineering or science, it's easier to understand licenses if you think of them as requirements documents or pseudocode. Ultimately, they boil down to "You may (or may not) use this thing, under such-and-such conditions." (GPL and some Creative Commons licenses are a little different, because they're more like "you can do anything you want with my stuff released under this license, provided that any of your stuff which is based on my stuff follows the same license and allows everyone else to do whatever they want with it under the same conditions.")

I've got a couple of illustrations which illustrate, in general (specific licenses may differ from the norm, so do your own research), which classes of licenses are compatible with each other (e.g. if a work has license X, can I combine it with or use it in a work with license Y) in a blog post linked in my signature.