From MIT to AGPL: Why We Changed the License

Blocks Beyond The Stars is open source — it has been from the start. But under which license, that's something we fundamentally changed along the way: from the permissive MIT license to AGPL-3.0. Here's the why.

What MIT would have meant: With MIT, anyone may take our code, modify it, and resell it as a closed product — without giving anything back. For libraries that's often exactly right. For a complete game with servers, it felt wrong: someone could have taken our work, built a commercial server service out of it, and kept the improvements to themselves.

What AGPL means: At its core, AGPL-3.0 says: take everything, change everything — but if you pass it on or run it as an online service, your changes have to be open as well. That "or run it as an online service" is the crucial difference from the regular GPL and fits a multiplayer game exactly. Anyone who runs a server with our code gives back to the community. Self-hosting for friends and family? Explicitly welcome — there's even a guide for it.

And the contributors? With the license change came a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), handled automatically on the first pull request. That sounds bureaucratic, but it protects both sides: it's unambiguously settled under which terms contributions flow into the project.

The switch was two days of work — license texts, headers, CLA bot, documentation. And it gave the project a foundation on which you can tell strangers with a clear conscience: join in, it stays open.