Why most SCP games violate SCP-Wiki license
⚠️⚠️⚠️ WARNING!!! I am NOT a lawyer. THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION!!!
If you scroll, you accept this warning.
Okay, let's start...
A note about SCP-Wiki licensing.
Many of us knows, that SCP-Wiki content is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0...
But do you know the actual license terms ?
As I understand, the license is not only "you can use and modify this content and it should be the same license". It is much deeper.
If you use CC-BY-SA content, even as a part of a larger work, your whole work should be compatible with CC-BY-SA.
Creative Commons specify compatible licenses... for CC-BY-SA 4.0 - these are CC-BY-SA, GPL 3 license for code and Free Art License. That's all.
For CC-BY-SA 3.0, which SCP-Wiki uses, the situation is more interesting - by default, CC-BY-SA 3.0 is compatible only with itself (that is why SCP-Containment Breach code is under CC-BY-SA license, even if it is not good for code). But SCP-Wiki licensing gave an exception for game developers - GPL 3 (they say in the FAQ, that "You can also choose to license your game under GPLv3, which is compatible with our license.").
As the result, SCP game developers should choose between GPL 3, which require to publish source code to people, who own a copy of a game, or CC-BY-SA 3.0, which require ALL of the code to be licensed under this license.
Let's see SCP games licenses.
Most SCP games are proprietary. That's fine, if you use CC-BY-SA 3.0 (which has no requirements about publishing code, it is about complete work). But are those games really use CC-BY-SA 3.0?
I don't even speak about Unreal Engine incompatibleness with both SCP licenses (which some SCP games use).
I speak about most of these SCP games violate the license by including non-CC-BY-SA libraries (which are NOT compatible with CC-BY-SA 3.0).
GPL 3 could partly solve that problem, but that license requires publishing code, which not many people want.
So what we have?
Some games, like SCP: Containment Breach (and most of it's mods) (CC-BY-SA 3.0), my SCP games (for example - SCP: Containment Procedures) (GPL 3 (as a whole piece)) are trying to comply with license, but most SCP games are in gray zone in licensing...