Licenses

What is recorded, what proves it, what needs crediting, and how to correct it.

The point of Tessera is that a file never loses the terms it came under. This is how that is kept.

#What is recorded

For every pack:

  • The license, by its identifier: CC0 1.0, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, OFL 1.1, MIT, a shop's standard license, or one you name yourself.
  • The credit line, when the license asks to be credited. Tessera fills one in from the pack and creator, and you can write your own.
  • The source: the page it came from, the site, and the creator.
  • The proof: the license files that shipped inside the pack, a snapshot of the page it came from, and an archive.org copy where one exists. They live in the pack's licence/ folder.

#What "needs credit" means

Tessera reads the license and knows whether it asks for attribution, whether it allows commercial use, and whether it demands that derivatives carry the same terms. A pack that asks for credit is marked, and every game it is copied into gets that line written into its credits file.

#Terms that restrict

A license that forbids commercial use, or is unclear, is marked so you see it before you ship. The Review screen exists so that nothing without an answer reaches a game at all.

#Changing one

Open the pack, press Edit details and set it. If you learn later that a pack is under different terms than you thought, correcting it here updates every game's credits the next time they are written.

This chapter is read from the repository. Suggest a change there.