Licensing your game

Every game says how it may be used, with a simple LICENSE file. Here’s how to pick one.

A licence just tells other people what they can and can’t do with your game. Every mebobox game needs one — a plain text file called LICENSE at the top of the game, next to index.html. If you make a game in Creator Studio, this is handled for you.

Which licences are allowed

Pick one of these:

• A permissive open-source licence — like MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD, ISC or Zlib. These let others learn from and build on your game. Apache 2.0 is a lovely default: get the plain text.
• The mebobox commercial licence — if you’d rather keep your game your own. Get the plain text.

Which aren’t

Copyleft and share-alike licences aren’t allowed — that’s GPL, AGPL, LGPL, SSPL, Creative Commons ShareAlike, and the like. They’d force anyone building on the mebobox to open up their own work too, which doesn’t fit a games platform.

This also means you can’t bundle code libraries that carry those licences.

Use your own stuff

Only put things in your game that you made yourself, or have permission to use — that goes for pictures, sounds and music as well as code.

The full legal details are in the Developer Agreement.