License of the Haxe standard libraries

[ex]

Hello list,
I just heard about the Haxe Foundation, I think it's a great move at
the right time and I wish luck to anybody involved in the process.

I read that the foundation is going to get copyright ownership of the
Haxe project.
I just want to point that this time I'd like to have a clear
definition of the license that is going to be used for the Haxe
standard libraries, they are currently BSD but there is some
discussion of they being possibly MIT.

Of course I'm biased in this having a background in a commercial
studio making medium/big web flash games for some of the big media
companies out there. That said, we are no rich by any means, there are
lot of competition and being cheap and high quality is a must.

So we are starting to test Haxe in our company, I love it, however we
started using it not due to the great features Haxe as a language has
(I love the macros, pre-processor, etc, etc Haxe beats AS3 hands
down), but due to the real advantage it can give us to target mobile
devices and other platforms thanks to NME. NME is still not suited for
our games I think, there are many little annoyances/bugs that need to
be addressed before we can have a *big* game done completely on NME,
but we see that there is a lot of momentum and having worked before in
casual C++ games we have already the tools that we can modify to
generate the art content for our games.

I hope not offend anybody, it is not my intention to brag or request
anything, there are lots of great languages out there that we could be
using, some even pushed by companies like Google or Mozilla but they
don't give us any real advantage even if they are cool, real world is
not about the cool languages but about the useful lannguages, and I
think NME/Haxe give us that advantage NOW

Of course Haxe is no new to us, I recall even talking a bit with
Nicolass in a previous GDC (in the Flash summit), Haxe always arose my
curiosity, but before NME there was more disadvantages than advantages
for using Haxe to us, some of our clients have monolithic and big
layers of bureaucracy, they until some time forbid the use of any open
source license projects IN AS3, just think about us using a esoteric
language. So to avoid any trouble we didn't invested time on Haxe. It
could be cool for our own projects, but we mostly do work for hire
projects.

Now NME has a MIT license that simplifies deploy and use of the
library for us, legally speaking somebody could say that the BSD
license is the same as the MIT license, but the distribution of the
copyright for binary distribution on the documentation for web and
mobile targets is not clear, you could say no, but my layer say
otherwise. Just to get things in context, some work-for-hire studios
like us work without credit in our own games, there is no mention of
us in the credits of the game, so we can even put that we are using
Haxe inside the game. we could push this, but we could lose something
in the process and we are not going to risk in this. I'm under NDA, I
can't even disclose the name of our clients.

So this is my point of view, maybe things are different for the PHP,
Javascript, Neko guys, I'm talking as simple game developer that earns
his bread doing little flash games.

If it were just about saying in our web page that we use Haxe it would
be no problem, we'll do that anyway, but this is not what the BSD
license says, so if if at the end of the day the foundation decides to
go with BSD it would be OK, but sad for us, we'll need to move away to
other projects with MIT license like cocos2d-x, gamekit, etc for multi-
platform support and still use Flash and HTML5 for the years to come.

Thanks for reading my long post.

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 25/05/2012 17:56, ex a �crit :

> Hello list,
> I just heard about the Haxe Foundation, I think it's a great move at
> the right time and I wish luck to anybody involved in the process.
>
> I read that the foundation is going to get copyright ownership of the
> Haxe project.
> I just want to point that this time I'd like to have a clear
> definition of the license that is going to be used for the Haxe
> standard libraries, they are currently BSD but there is some
> discussion of they being possibly MIT.

Hi,

We are already planning to switch all the standard library to MIT for
Haxe 3 release ;)

Then of course we will try to encourage users using BSD on haxelib to
switch to MIT as well, so it makes things simpler for everybody.

The compiler itself will keep its GPL status, but that does not affect
in any way the code it consumes or the output it produces.

Best,
Nicolas

[ex]

Hi Nicolas
glad to hear that, yes the compiler need/must to be GPL, there is no
problem there.

Thanks for your quick answer, I need to rush now to push more Haxe on
my company :D


On May 25, 11:21 am, Nicolas Cannasse <ncanna...@motion-twin.com>
wrote: