In the ToS, it says that “Anything you share is available to other users for any purpose, including the sharing of modified versions of your projects. By sharing a project, you are agreeing to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. […] This license also applies to any media (images, sounds, etc). you share on this site.“
but it also says I can waive the non-commercial part of the license: “(Fine print: If you want your project to be considered “free software” then you should waive the “NonCommercial” part of the license, but we do not impose this choice on you). “ How do I waive this?
And how does this interact with using snap to make commercial projects? For example:
I make a game with friends and share the in-dev version, via the website, with the others so we can each work on it and see what we’ve done without having to send files over. Does the sharing prohibit us from making money off of it? What if we waive the NC part of the license, can we only do that for free software?
I don’t think having access to a proper game engine isn’t really what we should be asking. I personally like snap, and I would be happy to create a game in snap. It’s really about what you would like to make a game in.
Interesting question. The ToS lumps sharing in with publishing in order to be conservative about our obligations regarding use of other people’s copyrighted material in your projects. But imposing the CC license really should apply only to publishing, not sharing. I’ll take it up with the team when we meet (soon I think).
You can write programs in Snap!, save them on your computer, put them in a Google Doc or something to share with collaborators, and not trigger any licensing requirements. But if you publish a project on our web site, you are implicitly telling everyone that they can use it, and the CC license just formalizes that.
Notwithstanding the above, our hope is that users will share our values regarding contributing to the wider public. We could have made Snap! a commercial program, but we wanted everyone to be able to use it, without financial roadblocks. We hope that you’ll feel the same way about your projects.
About NC or not: To fulfill our goal of encouraging sharing among users, we have to insist that when you publish a project, other Snap! users can use it in the same ways and for the same reasons that you do: to enjoy the game or animation or whatever, and to learn to program in part by examining other people’s code. We don’t feel that any of that requires you to let other people make money from your projects. So CC-BY-NC-SA is the minimum amount of sharing that we impose on published projects.
However, free software purists insist that it’s not free software unless anyone can use it for any purpose, including making money. So we’re just reminding you that if you’re a free software purist, you should license your work CC-BY-SA without the NC part. (You can do that by including a note to that effect, e.g. in the project notes field.)
I’m happy to create in Snap! as well, and I do enjoy creating games in it, but I don’t feel like it is prepared to create games outside of it’s sphere. Practically, I would use a game engine specifically created for making standalone applications (this is what probably should be done anyway).
Got it. Also, I realized a better way to phrase my specific concern: I want to eventually sell a game based on an idea I have, and I’m making the prototype via Snap!. I would like to publish the prototype, and i’m fine with the prototype being even CC0, but I want to eventually make a full version that I can make money on using the same mechanics and premise and everything, just expanded and probably in Unity, Unreal, or Godot. My worry was that unless the game was licensed under GNU or similar, which I don’t think applies to games, I had to license it under NC and therefore rule out making money if I wanted to publish a prototype. Now that I’m typing it tho, I do realize that CC only affects what others can do. However, I have a new question. My idea is based off of SCP, which is CC-BY-SA, which I think means I can’t publish under NC. Can I/do I need to waive the NC for that?