BEE2.4
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BEEmod
Add a license to Beemod.
It seems like there should be an explicit copyright license specified for each of the BEEmod repositories. You might also want to consider adding to the FAQ, explaining what people may and may not do with the various repositories. (e.g. May I use resources from the BEE2-items repo if I'm not using BEE2.4 itself?)
The last time this came up seems to be in Issue #9, but none of the reasoning there seems relevant anymore.
I am not sure how useful this would be for Beemod, but we will leave this suggestion open.
I am not sure how useful this would be for Beemod, but we will leave this suggestion open.
As stated in the link above by Commenter25, this program is currently illegal to use or modify, even privately. As you probably want this software to be used without being literally illegal, you probably want a license. My personal preference is MIT, but GPL is stricter and might be more aligned to this project.
Currently there are some Valve owned assets in this repository (mainly P2 editor icons and sounds) which might be the reason it doesn't currently have an open source license attached, those should maybe be moved into the clean style package on the BEE2-items repo to get around that issue.
We'll also need to decide exactly what license we want the project to be under. Since about 99% of the code here was written by TeamSpen, I think it should mainly be his call. At that point we would then need to contact anyone who has previously contributed to the project and ask them if they're OK with having their work released under the chosen license, otherwise if we can't reach them or they say no, we need to rewrite/replace their code. I don't think there have been very many contributors to the BEE2 app, so this process shouldn't be too hard - I think the main thing that might be an issue is actually the BEE2 icon, I don't even know who made that originally.
The BEE2-items repository consists almost entirely of modified or directly repackaged Valve assets, so it probably can't be reasonably put under any open source license. Perhaps we just attach a notice saying something along the lines of "Portal 2 assets are owned by Valve, but we give you permission to use these assets (including original assets) in your own custom Source Engine maps." We probably also want to link to the Steam Subscriber Agreement because I think it has a section about using Valve assets in games/mods.
Software licenses like MIT normally only apply to the code, not the assets. Free assets are generally under Creative Commons licenses. So it is perfectly fine to add your software license to this repo and state in the readme that the included assets are property of Valve. No need to move them to BEE2-items first.
If your code should not be used in closed-source applications, put it under GNU GPLv3.
If closed-source use is okay for you, I'd put it either under MIT (short and easy to understand) or under Apache 2.0 (more legal clarity). All of those licenses are widely used.
