cromlyngames/skeleton_world

An unofficial guide to making Powered By The Apocalypse Hacks

skeleton_world's Issues

License incompatible with commercial use

The readme says “I intend that you that you can use Skeleton_World to build a hack and sell it”, but the CC BY-NC 4.0 license explicitly prohibits commercial use.

To fix, either the “I intend…” sentence should be removed, or a new release with the CC BY 4.0 license should be made.

An explanation of the error

The misunderstanding might be that, since CC BY-NC does not have the ShareAlike requirement, that someone can use this to make a hack, and then relicense their own hack without following the NC requirement. This is not true. The ShareAlike requirement is not what makes a CC license's requirements apply to later work—all it does is require sharing the source material as well as the end product. What makes a CC license's requirements apply to later derivative works is not the SA requirement, it's the basic copyright concepts that CC is built on.

Without the SA requirement, Skeleton World does not require that others share their source files when distributing their hacks. Without the SA requirement, hacks based on Skeleton World still are forever bound by the NonCommercial requirement. Practically, this means that people can make hacks based on Skeleton World, give them away for free only, and are not required to share their source files for recreating their documents. However, they are prohibited from selling their hack, or any derivative work of their hack (licenses persist through derivative works—that's just a feature of copyright, and CC is built on top of that feature).

To be clear: prohibiting sales of all derivative works is explicitly the purpose of the NC part of CC BY-NC. If the intent is that people can build on Skeleton World to make a hack and sell it, the NC requirement has to be dropped. There aren't any trade-offs either: the NC requirement brings nothing else to the table; it only prohibits commercial derivative works.