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[time-killer-games]

Would it break the ENIGMA lisence agreement if I used ENIGMA as the compiler for my own commercial IDE? Technically, I would not be selling ENIGMA, nor any modified version of it. But I would be selling the IDE, which would require enigma.

This is just something I thought to consider...

[Josh @ Dreamland]

That was what we were discussing. Right now, our license is a mess, but whether the IDE is proprietary does not matter. In the future, I would like to continue to allow proprietary IDEs, so long as they do not do any of the following:

• Disguise the fact that ENIGMA is free software. Users should be aware that they have FOSS alternatives to the IDE, and that ENIGMA itself is free.
• Modify ENIGMA in any non-free way, which is forbidden by the GPL. All ENIGMA code must be open-source.
• Augment ENIGMA in any restrictive way; that is, offer non-free or specifically restricted extensions to ENIGMA which make it somehow more enticing to use the proprietary IDE (for reasons other than it is more intuitive, fast, or reliable than the free IDE).

So basically, as long as you're competing with your IDE, and not with ENIGMA, I have zero problem whatsoever with a proprietary IDE. I'd even encourage it in some cases. By competing with ENIGMA, I mean somehow getting ENIGMA itself to work better when used through your IDE; for example, by offering libraries or extensions that would not be available to users from another IDE that you do not control. In this case, I want the GPL to remain in full effect, so essentially, your options are to play nice and let everyone use your (proprietary) library (even if they have to pay for it), or to GPL it, in which case, everyone must use it open-source.

The simple answer to your question is, yes, you can have a proprietary IDE, as long as you don't try to be an asshole about it. Play fair, and no one will have a problem with it.

[time-killer-games]

Another question, let's say I make a *.egm archive / folder to a new platform converter (i.e. android apk, html5 js, tizen tpk, etc) would this also be alright as long as all I'm using that belongs to enigma is the reading of an input egm formated folder / zip and converting it to a platform which uses none of ENIGMA's compiler code? Just thought I'd double check this as well...

To clarify, I intend to write my own EGM reader that uses none of the code from ENIGMA's EGM reader.

Thanks!

[daz]

As an aside, what are you trying to accomplish by making a proprietary platform "converter"? If you're making it available for free, you might as well contribute to the Enigma project. If you're trying to make money, you're going to have to compete with GM:S, which is no small task.

[Josh @ Dreamland]

Technically, there's nothing we could do to stop you from doing that, if you weren't using any of our code. EGM is just a format; if you can read it, you can do anything you like to it. Especially convert it to another format.

While, in general, I'd prefer that an IDE which can read EGM also supports writing it, it isn't necessary, and I wouldn't act on it unless you managed to obtain legal rights to your own format which would prevent us from converting back and forth from it ourselves, which would be hard, number one, and also fall under the umbrella of trapping users in your IDE, which I'm against.