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Artist Alley

BSD-3-Clause license (initial choice)

Superseded — historical record. The initial license choice documented here is replaced by the AGPL + commercial direction in ADR 0016. Retained as historical record only.

Context

Section titled “Context”

artist-alley is forked from ResourceSpace (RS), which is distributed under BSD-3-Clause. Our additions must coexist with that license; we cannot relicense the inherited RS code, and a mismatched license on new code would create a confusing two-license repository.

We also have no monetization intent for artist-alley itself (optional paid support may follow but does not require a copyleft license to enable). The project should remain easy for game studios to self-host, modify, and re-distribute internally without legal review friction.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”
  • The entire artist-alley repository is licensed BSD-3-Clause.
  • Our additions are copyright Kenneth and artist-alley contributors.
  • The ResourceSpace license.txt and documentation/licenses/ directory are preserved unchanged so the upstream attribution remains intact.
  • The root LICENSE file documents our copyright and explicitly references license.txt for ResourceSpace’s notice.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Positive

  • One license to reason about across the whole repository.
  • Maximum permissiveness — studios can fork, modify, deploy internally, and never need to publish back. (No AGPL trap.)
  • Aligned with the OSS norms in the DAM and game-tools ecosystem.

Negative

  • A hyperscaler could in principle stand up a managed artist-alley service without contributing back. We have decided this risk is acceptable given no monetization intent.

Alternatives considered

Section titled “Alternatives considered”
  • MIT — equally permissive but requires a license change from the inherited RS code, creating dual-license confusion. Rejected.
  • AGPL-3.0 — would force any hosted derivative to publish source. Conflicts with inherited BSD code (we cannot relicense RS sources) and doesn’t match our “easy adoption” goal. Rejected.
  • Apache-2.0 — explicit patent grant is nice; but a license change from BSD adds friction without practical benefit at this stage. Rejected.