> In fact in this situation you would be better off with Wesnoth as GPL rather than MIT, because that way your closed-source competitors can't use your component in their games.
Ehh, but there's no direct monetary loss. Not many games stay relevant for a decade, so it's likely the commercial competitors will drop support after X years while you can backport their blackbox improvements. That said, I wonder if components of games are really that able to be copy pasted. My initial impression is NO, unless that was the intent when the component was first written.
So, mainly thinking of usability improvements. See Fallout New Vegas, which had iron sights. Sure you wouldn't have the code (in a universe where Fallout 3 was open source), but you would know how it works by treating it as a black box.
Ehh, but there's no direct monetary loss. Not many games stay relevant for a decade, so it's likely the commercial competitors will drop support after X years while you can backport their blackbox improvements. That said, I wonder if components of games are really that able to be copy pasted. My initial impression is NO, unless that was the intent when the component was first written.