License

[AliceDTRH]

Do I need to use the GPL license if I use your template to make an addon?

[leviem1]

Hi there @AliceDTRH! The legal situation around Spigot/PaperMC is a bit complicated, so I'll do my best to try to explain the licensing decisions here.

Technically, all Spigot/PaperMC plugins should be GPL. This is due to the GPL's "viral" nature. Because you use the Spigot API which is partially GPL'd, some parts of your code may be considered "derivative" since use of Spigot influences your code design (like extending JavaPlugin).

This has never actually been tried in court, however, so there is no precedence if this would actually constitute a GPL License violation.

To be overly cautious, new GPL derivatives have been created to explicitly allow a GPL'd project to be imported without license violations. I should probably switch this project to one of those. Update: Upon further research, Spigot would have to switch their license before I could switch mine.

IIRC PaperMC (and possibly Spigot) switched to an MIT license for new code, but I don't think it applies to existing APIs that were under GPL. For this reason, I've decided to keep this project GPL'd just to be safe.

If you want to use this project under a different license, I personally don't mind. I can't speak for Spigot's maintainers, but I don't think they've ever gone after anyone either. I encourage you to open source your projects (since this project wouldn't have been possible without other people doing so), but that's not something I intend to enforce.

Disclaimer: If you're going to publish under a different license, do so at your own discretion. I'm not a lawyer and can't give any sort of reliable legal counsel. All I'm saying is that I won't be the person to cause a fuss, but I can't say the same about anyone else.

Additional Reading

[AliceDTRH]

Thank you for your explanation, that helps a lot :)

[leviem1]

One more comment on this, I looked into if I could release this repo under GPL3 w/ Classpath Exception, but it seems that would violate the original GPL3 from Bukkit upstreams. So I will keep the license the same, but I don't intend to enforce licensing issues.

I can't say the same for Bukkit/Mojang, so violate the license at your own risk.