If you build a component yourself and own all the copyright in that component, then the fact that you've contributed it to a GPL project doesn't stop you from using it in your own products as well, or licensing it again to someone else under a different (non-exclusive) license.
In fact in this situation you would be better off with Wesnoth as GPL rather than MIT, because that way your closed-source competitors can't use your component in their games.
> In fact in this situation you would be better off with Wesnoth as GPL rather than MIT, because that way your closed-source competitors can't use your component in their games.
Ehh, but there's no direct monetary loss. Not many games stay relevant for a decade, so it's likely the commercial competitors will drop support after X years while you can backport their blackbox improvements. That said, I wonder if components of games are really that able to be copy pasted. My initial impression is NO, unless that was the intent when the component was first written.
So, mainly thinking of usability improvements. See Fallout New Vegas, which had iron sights. Sure you wouldn't have the code (in a universe where Fallout 3 was open source), but you would know how it works by treating it as a black box.
If you can't justify that, then don't contribute. It's that simple.
The license wasn't chosen randomly - it's there exactly so you can't use their time and effort by porting their components to closed source projects. It's not an unintended side-effect.
If your code is in fact completely yours, and not derivative work of others, you can simply re-license. If it isn't, you can hardly claim that you were duped. Or are you really saying that anybody mislead you on the copyleft aspects of the GPL?
Regardless of the merits or lack thereof of changing the license, it'd probably present an even larger problem, since they don't seem to ask for copyright assignment and they have 100+ contributors, all of whom would have to consent to the new license or have their code thrown out and cleanly reimplemented.
Agreed here. It's tedious to change license later on. So that's why there's tools to push it along, it's not the first time [1]
As a stop gap - they can implement a contributor clause starting immediately. They can also say future commits post-[ref] are <this license> until the prior code is sunsetted.
Typically there is an uppercrust where a very high percentage of the contributions lay. I haven't looked at the code (played the game all the time back in HS) but I'd bet you 90% of the code contributions are with the top 5 committers.
