Including others' I7 extensions in your repo?

I’m not sure if this is a good idea at all, but I wanted to ask.

I’m planning to release a game that makes use of quite a few old extensions and a few where I modified certain parts of the script. I’d like to give people a chance to build it, if they’re interested, with the caveat that I won’t provide technical support.

However, I think at the very least I would want to give the versions of the extensions I used to build the project.

The only problem is --this is other people’s intellectual property, and I have no clue about 1) copyright issues and 2) ethics in general.

So, is including others’ extensions, or my modifications of them, in a github repo doable? If I do include them, what issues should I watch out for?

Or should I just say “use version X of extension Y, with the Inform 6G Windows IDE” and hope/figure that’s enough? Because I think people could work out what I used, when and how, from the extensions printed with VERSIONS.

If you got the extensions from either any of the official sources (Inform website or Public Library) or from the Friends of I7 GitHub repo, they’re licensed CC-BY so sharing and redistributing is perfectly fine both legally and ethically.

If you have something from somewhere else and it doesn’t include a license, in theory you can’t redistribute without a permission but depending on where and how it was published there might be an implied consent to redistribute. I’m not a lawyer though so this is just your standard Internet advice.

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Everything in the Friends Repo or the Public Library or the extensions that used to be available on Inform7.com was released under a CC-BY license, either v3 or v4. And the community norm has been to act like the only obligation regarding redistribution is keeping the author’s name on it.

But there are actually a bunch of requirements for complying with CC-BY 4.0 and especially CC-BY 3.0 that basically everyone has ignored, including, for instance, providing or linking to the license, linking to or including the original work, and detailing any modifications to the work you’ve made.

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Thanks to both of you! I know there are lots of details to copyright laws, and with all that the extensions have helped me, I’d like to fill in those details when I can.

Because I know the basic idea is “don’t steal others’ work and give proper credit” but it’s so hard to codify precisely what that means.

It looks like a good solution, then, is to have an “Outside Extensions” folder and link to the CC licenses and note what goes where. It’s worth the extra time to nail that down.

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