Under what license is this code shared?

[bleathem]

I would like to use this amazing library in an application. Is the code copyrighted? Is it shared under an OSS license? If so, which one?

[justinj]

Ping @lgarron, I think this is something that should be looked at, given that min2phase is GPL I think that makes this GPL as well. Given that this is currently the most featureful scrambling library available (that I'm aware of) it might be good if that were mentioned in a LICENSE file or the readme.

edit: @cs0x7f may be interested as well

[lgarron]

I try to release stuff I write under the MIT license. Tracking down the original authors of parts of this could would take a bit of due diligence, though.

[lgarron]

@cs0x7f What's your policy on licensing? Would you be willing to release your code in this repository under an MIT license?

[StachuDotNet]

ping.

[lgarron]

For what it's worth, this currently contains a lot of code contributed to the WCA without a license. It's unlikely that the license situation will be clear (either GPL or MIT) until it's rewritten from scratch.

[psifertex]

Unfortunately, the lack of any license means folks using this (or forks: https://github.com/nickcolley/scrambo) are in legally grey territory which I doubt is the intention.

Given that the only other contributors appears to be Chen Shuang (and they no longer have a GH account?) maybe just adding a license file clarify that all YOUR contributions are licensed under X would allow for people to optionally exclude the two commits that Shuang added and at least be sure of their restrictions (edit: or rights)?

[lgarron]

Unfortunately, the lack of any license means folks using this (or forks: https://github.com/nickcolley/scrambo) are in legally grey territory which I doubt is the intention.

Given that the only other contributors appears to be Chen Shuang (and they no longer have a GH account?) maybe just adding a license file clarify that all YOUR contributions are licensed under X would allow for people to optionally exclude the two commits that Shuang added and at least be sure of their restrictions (edit: or rights)?

Unfortunately not. Chen Shuang actually licenses all his stuff under GPL, but a lot of the code is still based on oooold WCA scramblers. I expect we'll have a properly licensed open-source replacement by the end of the year, but no timeline yet. :-(

[psifertex]

Ahh, i didn't realize that lineage, I was just noticing the commit history. Thanks for the clarification. That would be great news.

Though even given that, just slapping GPL on this seems safe and at least gives clarity for folks that might wish to use it?

[lgarron]

Though even given that, just slapping GPL on this seems safe and at least gives clarity for folks that might wish to use it?

In case it's not clear from above, many important parts of this code base were not written by me, nor by Chen Shuang.

It's not simple to isolate their contributions from ours, and it's not a priority for me to track them down rather than writing new software to replace those parts. If you'd like to track them down yourself, I can help you, but we'd have to contact at least all the people here, and make sure no other code has accidentally snuck in:

https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/regulations/history/files/regulations2010.html#scrambling

[lgarron]

btw, I'm licensing all our new projects (e.g. https://github.com/cubing/cubing.js) under GPL, so those should have no trouble being compatible with Chen Shuang's code.

[psifertex]

Gotcha -- I didn't realize that prior commits were actually pulled in from another source that had lots of contributions. Great to know about the other project, thanks.