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Relicensing

Date: 2025-04-15 13:21
Tags: minecraft

From about 2012-2015 I made a whole bunch of Minecraft mods (which I'm now calling "series 1") and chose an MIT license because I didn't know much about licensing and didn't think it mattered anyway. Now, since I understand why the MIT license is bad, so I'm changing it to AGPL. Since there are several problems with AGPL in a Minecraft modding context, I also wrote several exceptions. The new license is here.

Not all files are provided under this license. Some trivial mods are still MIT; files that were never published with source code are still MIT; and Advanced Repulsion Systems (a.k.a. Modular Force Field Systems) remains LGPLv3 since it's based on someone else's work which they licensed that way.

By the time you read this, the modjam series might have also been updated, or it might not have.

At the same time, I had to rewrite the URL structure so that any old links won't work — you have to go through the new index page to make sure you read that the license has changed.

As part of this work, since I had to make a machine-readable index of these files, I re-generated the index page using the newest design. I also discovered some anomalies:

  • Sometimes the same filename was present in different directories. Some of these only had different timestamps, but at least one appeared to have new code in the newer file. I appended .2 to the filename and displayed version number (but I didn't edit the file itself, so this won't appear in-game).
  • keep-tes-loaded_rev2_for_1.2.5-bukkit.jar contains no class files, only metadata files, which weren't even standard in that version of Minecraft, and is therefore completely useless. That's an exception to the principle of keeping files published, so I deleted it. Obviously nobody ever installed this on any Bukkit server, or they would have noticed and I would have fixed it. There was probably a much better way to achieve the same effect in Bukkit natively than with a Forge mod ported to Bukkit.
  • Advanced Repulsion Systems (formerly MFFS) was missing a license declaration and since it's based on third-party code I couldn't just choose a license. After finding the original forum thread I found it was LGPLv3 — I know that I made it with permission from the original authors, so that must have been correct. Now the license file is included.
  • A range of versions of Immibis Core contain (part of?) the ComputerCraft API. I found the advice ComputerCraft's author gave about the API — he said you should not include these files in your mods. Which is presumably why I removed them later. I've made sure to note that these files have unclear licensing status. You can probably delete them and the mod will still work, but I haven't tried it, so I'm not going to remove them from these hosted files.
  • Sometimes two identical files existed, but one had a .zip extension and one had .jar. In these cases, I deleted the .zip.
  • A small number of files didn't need to be changed because they contained an MIT license text and are still MIT-licensed.

Update: for the benefit of the people at Modrinth Archives, a machine-readable index file is provided.

(Also, this post is the first one with a non-numeric URL, since I wanted something more stable to reference from other pages. I'll probably move the rest at some point.)