I’m planning to release an asset on the assetstore, but also provide a part of it free and open on a site like github.
The core, with basic functionalities would be open and free to inspect and modify, by cloning the git repo.
Some advanced functionalities will be added to the asset and sold on the asset store. Sometimes people don’t have the time or skills to add them themselves to the basic package.
The asset will mainly consist of code and will be applied on some example 3D models and textures. The important part is the code, the assets are there to illustrate and therefore will be part of the basic package.
A CreativeCommons license is better suited to art assets, the code part make me say that a CC license isn’t the best choice, for example.
What choice of licence do I need to make to be compatible with both cases : free & open source on github, and sold on the assetstore ?
@hasanbayat : then what kind of license would be compatible ?
For example, if I choose GPL2/GPL3 for the code on github, I won’t be able to relicense with something else the same base available on the assetstore.
Does somebody has any example of an asset on the store already doing that kind of things ?
The person who wrote the code can choose any combination of licences for the thing they made. The GPL doesn’t take away YOUR rights to your own code. It’s not uncommon to release something as some form of GPL, but offer other deals to people with piles of cash.
See Qt for a popular example. You can use the LGPL edition and release something commercially, and have to release modifications if you change it, but companies with a commercial licence can use the static version if they like, and don’t have to release any modifications.
There’s also MIT/BSD/Zlib if you want other people to use the free version for whatever they want (including commercial, closed source games or add-ons based on it) or Apache (which is the pedantic version of the previous three, adding patent guarantees among other things). See tl;drLegal for some clarifications.
A GPL2 or 3 version of your code doesn’t stop you from selling a version with different licensing terms. The GitHub version could work as a limited demo since people get to try it, but can’t release anything but GPL2/3 games.