First of all, some background. Over the past year or so, I've spent close to a grand on Ren'Py related expenses. These come in many forms. $800 for the server that hosts bishoujo.us, renai.us, and these forums. $70 for a mac to develop the mac port on. Then there's money for drawing tablets, money to go to cons to promote Ren'Py... it adds up.
Now, don't take this as me complaining. I mean, Ren'Py is a hobby, and one I truly enjoy. I like playing the Ren'Py games people create, and I even like doing the various support jobs. While documentation and testing aren't the most fun activities I could think of, they're worth doing because people make the games I want to play.
And that's really why I made Ren'Py... to play the games that I enjoy.
What do I enjoy. Well, first and foremost, there are the usual bishoujo games. There's also the Bishonen games, like AP and WiRTW... I wasn't sure I'd like them at first, but hey, I was able to make the perspective switch. Go figure. I also like the girl-girl games, perhaps for a different reason.
Now, what did I leave out of this?
The BxB games. Boy's Love, Yaoi, whatever you want to call them... I have no interest in them whatsoever. They just don't seem like the type of game I'd be interested in playing.
So I need to ask myself, why am I bothering to give away a huge amount of work (Sloccount calls it $300,000+, but I'd guess it probably is worth closer to $50,000) to people who want to make games that fail to interest me?
After months of thinking, I haven't been able to come up with a good answer.
Anyway, as of the next release of Ren'Py, I've decided to add a clause to the license to forbid distribution of Ren'Py with Boy's Love games. I'd expect the license to read something like:
Code: Select all
Copyright 2004-2006 PyTom <pytom@bishoujo.us>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
(the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,
including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
The Software may not be distributed with a "Boy's Love"
game. For the purposes of this license, a "Boy's Love" game is any
work of fiction or nonfiction featuring (along any path) an
exclusively male relationship, regardless of the age of the characters
in that relationship.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Now, say you're making a BL game... what do you do?
Well, first of all, realize this won't go into effect for a while. I'm planning on giving a grace period of until the middle of April (call it April 15th) for people to finish working on NaNoRenO games. It will probably take me at least that long to make the first release of Ren'Py 5.5, which will probably be the series leading up to Ren'Py 6.
After the license changes, however, BL-game makers will have some choices:
1) Stick with Ren'Py 5.4. While I discourage the use of older version of Ren'Py, there aren't any known unfixed bugs in the 5.4 series, so you can probably stick with that for a while. Of course, there's a limit to the support which I can provide for older version of Ren'Py, so you'll need to take that into account.
2) Require users to download Ren'Py separately from the game, and merge them themselves. I specifically don't forbid this... but it would be awful inconvenient for users.
3) Buy a license. That's right, I will be making Ren'Py distribution licenses available for BL-games. There will probably be a per-game license for freely distributable games, and a small per-copy fee for commercial games. Obviously, this is the choice I hope BL-game creators will decide to take.
The goal of this isn't to make me rich, so it's not like I'll be charging huge amounts of money for this. (I figure no more than $100 for the free game fee, and no more than $1 for the per-copy fee.) But I do hope to get a small stream of income that I can plow back into Ren'Py development. (I believe $200-$300 will be enough to enable me to work on port to the PSP, for example.)
Anyway, I'd appreciate comments from people, letting me know what they think of this. While my mind's mad up about the basics of this, I'd be open to suggestions on the details.
