Commercial Use

Crank · Post by **Crank** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:27 pm

Now I know that the zlib license allows for commercial use... But could I create an engine based off Irrlicht then license it? Like do I HAVE to use zlib for everything?

Of course I will credit the JPEG Group and Irrlicht.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:50 pm

There are no real limits coming from the Irrlicht license. You are not allowed to say that you wrote the engine code on your own. Besides that you can do everything with it.
A short note for avoiding typical pitfalls. Don't try to hide you're using Irrlicht. You'll lose the ability to adapt the "service packs" of new Irrlicht releases, and you'll gain nothing

Sylence · Post by **Sylence** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:51 pm

Are there any restrictions in the license text?

You can do everything you want with it, as long as you say that you didn't wrote the original software (since you will credit Irrlicht this is no problem), that it is not the original software (when you credit Irrlicht it should be enough) and if you include the license.txt in every source distribution (since the app is commercial I doubt you will release any source code

)

So everything should be fine.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:51 am

hybrid wrote:Besides that you can do everything with it.

... except remove the existing zlib style license.

Sylence is right, of course: there's no onus on you to release source with your binaries. If you do release source, then you can slap on any additional license terms that you like, but since you can't remove the original zlib license, you would be dual licensing the source.

Your recipients can then choose to honour the zlib license terms (i.e do pretty much whatever they want with it), which - by design - makes attempting to attach a restrictive license rather pointless.