Hi,

was it a conscious choice to not include an open source license in this project?
With the current state it seems "all rights reserved".
On https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/questie it says that the project is under the GNU General Public License (Version 3), but the license file does not seem to be present in the repository. If that's the license of the project it seems helpful to include the license in the repository for clarity.

Thanks.

Best regard.

So with this issue and the PR being open for so long now I just thought it might make sense to leave some updates here.

This has been discussed internally in the meantime by some of the most active contributors/maintainers of Questie and so far all of them agreed, at least in general, to put their contributions under some open source license. Basically the idea is that we gather consent from as many contributors as we can manage to retroactively license their original contributions under some agreed upon license(s).

I had created #4660 as an example for how that could look like. After creating that there appeared some further things to consider, some of which are already addressed in the latest commit I just added to that PR:

• Maybe choosing a GPL license was a bit premature. Upon further reading of the license some of the clauses are rather hard to guarantee; We might be better advised to aim for a more "fire and forget" type license like MIT or BSD, basically just saying we give no guarantees for functionality and anybody may use and change this however they see fit. Maybe just put it in the public domain, i.e. agree to waive copyrights as far as you are allowed to in your jurisdiction.
• To do this going forward is simpler, there is something called a "Contributor License Agreement" (CLA) we can use. Basically make anybody that creates a PR agree to some licensing terms first (which we never did before). And as far as my (very limited) understanding of international IP laws goes, former contributors should be able to agree to do this retroactively. And as long as we get coverage for an overwhelming majority of the code we should be fine to do that.
• Towards this end there is one further problem to consider, which is the best possible separation of code or other content with different licenses, e.g. the used libraries in the Libs directory with everything in there belonging to their respective authors. It might be worth it to solve this by using git submodules, instead of just mentioning it in the license files.

All that said, I don't think it is that urgent and will leave the issue open for some time probably. To my knowledge, the only instances where it was raised were here and one Reddit post (which was also in favour of an open source license though I believe).

Furthermore, just to reinforce this, there will never be a 100% certain licensing situation for Questie, especially not historical versions of Questie, for various reasons, some of which are listed here. It should therefore be considered "all rights reserved" at all times. If you can accept that risk then feel free do with it as you please.

Comments by past and current contributors in here or on PR #4660 are encouraged.

was it a conscious choice to not include an open source license in this project?

No just historic reasons™. Basically the question never came up and when it finally did going back and asking every contributor over the previous years to agree to a license was just not feasible anymore.

With the current state it seems "all rights reserved".

Essentially yes. I for one don't care how my code is used, but can't speak for others.

On https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/questie it says that the project is under the GNU General Public License (Version 3), but the license file does not seem to be present in the repository.

This was set because back when we first uploaded Questie there was no option to set "all rights reserved" yet, which has changed since I believe but changing it for Questie just never came up.

I'll leave this issue open as a reminder to fix the CF license and add a file to repo to explain the situation.