Tilengine - The 2D retro graphics engine forum

Overall pleased with the move to opensource for Tilengine, but I do have one concern. I'm working on a game in my free time in the (still pre 1.0) language that I work on.

I mostly adapted the bindings from the C# ones (as well as the C header files, of course). The LGPL has a weird "10 lines or less" clause for header files in terms of linking, but I'm not sure how this applies to binding. While I'm using Tilengine as a DLL, the binding code is of course statically linked in to allow one to use the DLL.

If this does constitute a derived work as far as the LGPL is concerned, then I could never use Tilengine in a non LGPL project, which is a deal breaker for me -- I'd have to rewrite the engine code for my project, and remove Tilengine from our binding repository. Which would be a shame, but I'd rather find out sooner rather than later.

Hi! I'm glad you're pleased by the move and that you're already working with it.

You don't have to worry about the licensing concern:

1. Your binding for the volt language is not a derivative work, but your own work. You haven't modified Tilengine core, but provided a brand new component that uses it. You could safely paste your own copyright and license on top of it if you wanted.
   
2. If you were modifying the library core to adapt it to your product -that's not the case right now-, you must publish your modifications to the tilengine library in the open source -something you're already doing with the bindings-. But your game engine would remain safe under your own copyright.
   

You can safely proceed with your current work.

I understand these concerns about licensing, and I'm not a lawyer but a developer  
The use of the GPL license would be really problematic (not the LGPL!) because you would be forced to release all your own work as GPL with full source code. The use of LGPL in the other hand is just protecting me that anyone couldn't take Tilengine, modify ir (or not at all), change the license and start selling it as a propietary, closed-source product. As long as you're not doing this, you aren't violating LGPL.

So you're developing a programming language! That's an impressive task, I checked its website and project. I hope that it grows in use and popularity.

That was my assumption as well, but I just wanted to double check. Thanks!