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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2021

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  • I am happier when I see copyleft but let’s be honest, I would contribute to an interesting, useful project regardless of their choice between MIT and GPL. Same for companies: some prefer MIT, but there is no way they are not going to contribute to the Linux Kernel just because of copyleft. So bottom line is: make something that people enjoy/find useful and see contributors flocking.

    CLAs are a different matter: I do not contribute to projects which ask you to assign them copyright unless I 100% trust the organisation behind them.


  • I feel one of the most important things for a thriving open source project is easy onboarding.

    Statement of friendliness and similar are not that useful if I don’t know where to start to contribute to your project. A clean, up to date CONTRIBUTING file goes a long way, architecture documentation is extremely good, optimal is having an experience developer checking your patches and offering help.

    Repositories that I contribute to the most helped me in the first phases of the journey, it was awesome, I gave back.





  • If some code links to your GPL library, the whole project has to be licenced GPLv3, full stop. This does not “prevent people to use [it] at all”, it just stipulates that they have to make the source available and the source of improvements they make available. Each substantial library I write in my free time is GPLv3. I want to contribute to the ecosystem and I want everyone enjoying my work contributing back to the ecosystem.

    A similar licence, called LGPL, allows dynamic linking without having to make the code of the whole project available, just the code of the specific library + improvements. If for some reason you need this, I invite you to check how dynamic linking works in Pharo and read this FAQ by the FSF (and all other FAQs, it is a very clear, informative document).



  • Great suggestions in this discussion! Rather than adding my favourites, I will add some resources that list more games.

    • Libregamewiki: it is really comprehensive (sometimes too much, including even not-so-good-games). They care about licencing and is is very easy to browse, top-notch for me.
    • Open source games: a more relaxed repository, with lots of material.
    • bobeff open source list: this is curated, which means that there are not so many games but each and every one is stable, good, maintained.
    • Arcane Cache: a fantastic blog with reviews of libre games — or more precisely, underground games, there is a lot of discussion on how gamedevving philosophy too. The reviews are always in-depth and allow you to experience the games on another level, and each game is a small jewel in its category. Strongly recommended!