this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Like many people, I have aspirations of making games. One thing I'm planning on is some sort of charter or agreement (which I could hopefully automate somehow) that 5 years after the last update that the code would go open source. Some sort of attribution, no commercial use license or something.
Great idea, that's what I would probably do as well if I wanted to make a commercial game.
Just remember, if you want something to be "Open Source" or "Free Software", the license can't prohibit commercial use [0][1]. If you really want others to be able to continue maintaining the project after you have stopped, they need to have permission to recoup their costs for servers, physical copies and to get paid for their development time. (Open Source) development needs to be financially sustainable; and if that is forbidden for future developers, it's not a community project anymore, i.e. not Open Source.
Also, if by "attribution, no commercial use" you mean some Creative Commons license, they explicitly discourage use of their licenses for software [3].
[0] https://opensource.org/osd
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling
[3] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software