terms of use

[Sukotto]

Can I create a commercial closed source game with models generated by MakeHuman?
Answer:
In short, yes. We have created MakeHuman with the vision to make it free, free as in giving people the freedom to create things with it and do whatever they wish with their creations. So the output of MakeHuman is released under public domain (CC0).

Of course you can't use the output to create a "game" that mimic a closed source version of MakeHuman.

is an adventure survival RPG game with a charactor customization screen that uses Make human for customizing/personalizing your charactor considered a mimc of a closed source of makehuman?

[joepal]

Of course you can't use the output to create a "game" that mimic a closed source version of MakeHuman.

Actually there is no explicit license restriction for what you can or cannot do with an exported model. That model is licensed under CC0 without further restrictions as long as you used an official and unmodified distribution of MakeHuman to make the export and did the export via the MakeHuman application (ie did not copy the raw files directly from the source tree).

However, derived code (and it's output) and aggregated code that use MakeHuman as a part of a larger software, fall within the domain of AGPL. The MakeHuman code as such is never CC0 licensed: it's licensed AGPL.

is an adventure survival RPG game with a charactor customization screen that uses Make human for customizing/personalizing your charactor considered a mimc of a closed source of makehuman?

If you include the MakeHuman software or any part of the MakeHuman source code as a part of your product, you fall into the domains of what is regulated by AGPL. In which case the aggregated product has to be licensed AGPL. This is not in any way dependent on the purpose of your software.

However: if you instead make a number of exports and then include that data (ie, the exported files) in your final product, then you benefit from the CC0 exemption and will not have to adhere to the terms of AGPL.

In summary:

• Using the MakeHuman software as such (or parts thereof) as a component anywhere in a product: product must be AGPL
• Using MakeHuman exported files anywhere in a product: product does in practice not have any particular license restrictions

[duststorm]

is an adventure survival RPG game with a charactor customization screen that uses Make human for customizing/personalizing your charactor considered a mimc of a closed source of makehuman?

Most probably: yes it is.

You are free to use exported meshes from MakeHuman as characters for your game, you are even free to model your own variations on those meshes and use them in your own character creator. But the moment you start giving the user control over Makehuman modeling properties, be it directly through MakeHuman code, or by reverse engineering the target modeling data, you are bound by the AGPL license.

This question has been posed before, this should clarify how we interpret the license: viewtopic.php?p=23649#p23649
Some other related threads:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10937
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10863

[duststorm]

However: if you instead make a number of exports and then include that data (ie, the exported files) in your final product, then you benefit from the CC0 exemption and will not have to adhere to the terms of AGPL.

That's not entirely correct. The targets data is actually AGPL licensed, and we do not drop this license.

When you export a mesh, you benefit from the export exception to the data that we allow (CC0 output). In short we drop the AGPL license on content created with MakeHuman that is exported by the official exporters. The morphs data itself, however, is still licensed under the AGPL license. Exporting many meshes and reverse engineering the morph data from those does not break you free from AGPL.

In short: if you plan to use MakeHuman technology for character modeling, or try to replicate part of the functionality of MakeHuman, you are bound to the AGPL license and we expect that you donate your application back to the community, in the same spirit in which we released the MakeHuman software to you.

We would apploud an extendable open source RPG engine with integrated character editor (possibly based on MakeHuman), though
If the engine is open sourced, the game assets and all content can still be under a commercial license. This license model is applied in the game Ryzom: http://www.ryzomcore.org/ for example.