Help:Licenses

In gaming, a License is a document that is included with a video game that outlines what a player (for legal purposes, the player of often called the End User) is able to do with that game. Licenses come in one of two primary formats; Proprietary, and Open-Source.

A proprietary license is often custom-written by a company, and generally has to be accepted by the end user as a condition of using the software; one such example is the infamous End User License Agreement, although the legal enforceability of that particular license is disputed, and has not yet been tested in a legal environment. Additionally, online games may also include Terms of Service; these documents outline the basic behavior that is expected of the End User, and outline the conditions, if any, that need to be met for an account to be terminated. Such terms may also include a provision of how long the company intends to give before a complete shutdown of the service.

An open-source license is included with software, and these licenses outline the rights that the End User and the developers and/or copyright holders have with regard to the downloaded software.

There are many examples of open-source licenses:


 * Apache License
 * BSD License
 * Creative Commons License
 * GNU General Public License
 * GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License)
 * MIT License

Different licenses provide different protections, and the choice of license may affect what may be done with the source code, the compiled binaries, the included assets, or a combination of all three, by the end user.

Other licenses
Video games may be released as Freeware by the developer or copyright holder. In general, this freely permits the redistribution of the game's binary and associated assets, although there are exceptions. Many freeware licenses stipulate that the game must be redistributed with all of its released filed attached, and unaltered.

Many games were released under a Shareware license. Broadly, these games had the same redistribution terms as Freeware, with added stipulation that the copyright holder be paid a sum for the use of the software. Many early games operated under the trust system; the software offered full functionality, but asked that the end user kindly send them currency for using the software. This later evolved to software being shipped with functionality hidden behind a gating system, often requiring a key to unlock, in order to force people to pay for the software's main functionality.

Because this could be bypassed by a person with enough knowledge, this led to "demo" software being developed. These were bare-bones demonstration versions of software that were not coded with the full functionality of the software., and therefore had nothing to "unlock".