licsense?

[crunch]

can someone please tel me why most mods have licenses ?

mods are for free so why do people put licenses on them?

is it so others cant steel there mod

someone clear this up for me please

[technicalfool]

In many countries, if no license is specified, it is assumed to be "All Rights Reserved." That is, no redistribution, no third party fixes, no anything without the original author's say so. Naturally this is a problem if there's an old but popular mod that stops working with a new version, and the original author is nowhere to be found.

So, you can include licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses that are essentially a "do whatever you want with it" license, the GPL and LGPL which are basically "do what you want with it, but derivative works also have to be GPL/LGPL", and things like Creative Commons, which have a whole range of different types of conditions such as "do what you want with it, but credit the author" or "do what you want with it, but no commercial use."

Given the number of different licenses out there and the possibility for confusion and the legal trouble that can result, it's easier to just have a rule to demand that all mods released via the forums must specify their license, even if that license is "all rights reserved".

[crunch]

In many countries, if no license is specified, it is assumed to be "All Rights Reserved." That is, no redistribution, no third party fixes, no anything without the original author's say so. Naturally this is a problem if there's an old but popular mod that stops working with a new version, and the original author is nowhere to be found.

So, you can include licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses that are essentially a "do whatever you want with it" license, the GPL and LGPL which are basically "do what you want with it, but derivative works also have to be GPL/LGPL", and things like Creative Commons, which have a whole range of different types of conditions such as "do what you want with it, but credit the author" or "do what you want with it, but no commercial use."

Given the number of different licenses out there and the possibility for confusion and the legal trouble that can result, it's easier to just have a rule to demand that all mods released via the forums must specify their license, even if that license is "all rights reserved".

thank you, because this a international forum would that mean some laws/licenses etc clash. because one country is not the same as the other