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Licensing

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Will Thompson edited this page Feb 18, 2026 · 1 revision

All assets and code in Threadbare must be released under licenses that allow us to distribute the game, both as an open-source project here on GitHub, and to players on the web, PC, mobile devices and potentially consoles in future.

When we use third-party assets and code, we need to be sure we know what license they are covered by, so that we can be sure we have the legal right to distribute them; so that we appropriately credit their authors in the game; and so that other games that want to reuse our assets in turn know their legal rights and obligations.

Copyright licenses are a complicated topic! Please ask us if you're not sure whether you can use an asset in Threadbare: we are always happy to help. It is better to check sooner, rather than waiting until you have built a level or quest using the asset and then discovering we cannot accept it.

Asset Licensing

Original artwork and other non-code assets should use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Third-party assets covered by licenses other than CC-BY-SA-4.0 may be used if their license allows redistribution, potentially commercially. We prefer standard, widely-used licenses Creative Commons licenses because their meanings are well-understood and their text has been rigorously reviewed by legal experts. Note that not all Creative Commons licenses are usable in Threadbare: see below for examples.

It is common for collections of free game assets to have custom licensing terms which allow the assets to be used in free or commercial games, but do not allow redistribution of the assets themselves. Unfortunately, assets under such licenses cannot be used in Threadbare, because including the assets in the (public) Threadbare Git repository constitutes redistribution. Some examples of such licenses are given below.

Acceptable asset licenses

Unsuitable asset licenses

Assets under the following licenses cannot be used in Threadbare:

  • Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International cannot be used in Threadbare because it does not allow commercial use. We would like to keep open the option of making a paid version of Threadbare available.

  • The Pixabay Content License, which states:

    You cannot sell or distribute Content (either in digital or physical form) on a Standalone basis. Standalone means where no creative effort has been applied to the Content and it remains in substantially the same form as it exists on our website.

    However, section 4 of the Pixabay Terms of Service says:

    Some of the Content made available for download on the Service is subject to and licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license ("CC0 Content"). CC0 Content on the Service is any content which lists a "Published date" prior to January 9, 2019.

    Such content can be used in Threadbare.

Code Licensing

Original source code (including GDScript source files, Godot scene files, and .dialogue files) should use the MPL 2.0 license.

Third-party code covered by licenses other than MPL 2.0 may be used if its license allows it to be combined with MPL-licensed code and with proprietary code (such as Godot engine ports to games consoles). For example, the MIT license is okay, while the GNU GPL is not.

License Annotations

Source code and assets added to the project should have their copyright owner and license described in machine-readable form following the REUSE specification. For source code, include a comment like the following at the start of your source file:

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: The Threadbare Authors
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MPL-2.0

For images, sounds, and other file formats that do not allow comments, you can add a .license file adjacent to the file, or provide this information in REUSE.toml. Use existing files in the repository as a reference. If you're not sure how to do this, the Threadbare maintainers will be happy to help.

For significant contributions, add yourself (or the copyright owner of your work, if not you) to the AUTHORS file.

No IP infringement

Assets may not knowingly infringe somebody else's intellectual property. For example, a hand-drawn illustration of a Star Wars character cannot be accepted by the project, even if the illustration itself is your own original work. By contrast, fan art based on an original image where the original image is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 or another suitable license is allowed by that license and so is acceptable, provided the copyright owner of the original work is also cited as a joint owner of the fan art.

AI-generated assets and code

We strongly prefer that assets in Threadbare are created by hand, without using generative AI.

While AI tools can be useful as part of a creative process, at Endless Access we aim to teach fundamental creative skills through game-making: animation, visual design, sound design, game design, etc. We believe that having a solid grounding in the underlying skills is necessary to create high-quality art, whatever tools are used by the artist.

Handmade assets are also in keeping with the aesthetic of the Threadbare world (an environment patched together from fabric, using traditional techniques and tools) and our use of free and open source tools to create the game.

All this being said, we do accept assets which have been created partly or wholly by AI, provided that:

  1. the AI tool used is cited in a corresponding .license file;

  2. the AI tool's terms of use allows the asset to be placed under a suitable license for this project;

  3. the commit message or .license file describe who used the AI tool, whether the asset is purely AI-generated or whether the creator modified it after generation or provided another asset as input to the AI tool, and ideally the model (if known) and prompt used.

For example, the previous main menu logo at assets/first_party/logo/threadbare-logo.png was generated with Midjourney, with no modifications. It was accompanied by a threadbare-logo.png.license file in the same folder which said:

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: The Threadbare Authors
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0

This image was created using Midjourney by Joana Filizola.

The Midjourney Terms of Service state that:

You own all Assets You create with the Services to the fullest extent possible under applicable law.

so we are able to place the resulting asset under CC-BY-SA-4.0, the preferred asset license for this project.

In their article Understanding CC Licenses and Generative AI, the Creative Commons team recommends that assets whose creation did not involve a significant degree of human creativity should be placed under CC0-1.0.

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