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9.10 — Impact, Ethics & Licenses (Your Fork!)

Your whole semester is a FOR: you copied someone else's project, legally, and made it yours. Today: why that was legal, what you owe for it, and the bigger questions — who gets to build games, whose data gets taken, and what happens when "the internet" is where 8 billion people's lives actually live.

In this lesson you will be able to answer“what do I owe the project I forked?”
Break It Down~10 min

You forked somebody else's project, built your own game on top of it, and now you want to put it where people can play it. That is not one decision. It is five, and four of them are already settled by a file that arrived with the repo, that you have opened exactly once, and that most people never open again.

First, before anything else: cut that into parts small enough that you could look each one up on its own.

  1. Read what the license actually granted youwhat does this part do?Read: section 2 of the LICENSE file in your own fork, and the license table in this lesson's Concept Lab
  2. Keep the noticeswhat does this part do?Read: the "You must" column of this lesson's license table
  3. Say out loud which files you changedwhat does this part do?Read: section 4 of your fork's LICENSE, and the Apache 2.0 row of this lesson's license table — "Keep the notice, state your changes, and pass on the patent grant"
  4. Credit every asset you did not makewhat does this part do?Read: the CC BY and CC BY-SA rows of the license table, the CREDITS-file paragraph in this lesson's Concept Lab, and the fairness thread from 9.6
  5. Decide what the people who play it are owedwhat does this part do?Read: the digital-divide and data sections of Concept Lab II, and the dataset questions you answered honestly and locally in 9.5

The split is the whole lesson, because "is my game legal?" has no single answer — it is five questions with five answers, and four of them are yes if you do them and no if you skip them. They are not equally obvious either: the notices one is forgettable, the changes one is genuinely surprising, and the last one is not a license question at all. A student who can tell those five apart will not be caught out by a question asking which concern is most significant, because they will know there was more than one concern on the table.

The test for a finished split: can you settle each part by opening one file or naming one sentence? The first three are all settled by the LICENSE already sitting in your own fork — section 2 for what you may do and section 4 for what you owe. The fourth is settled by wherever the sprite came from. The fifth cannot be settled by a file at all, which is exactly what makes it the one you decide rather than look up.

Your turn

Pick two of the parts above and say in one line what each one actually does.

People routinely license their code one way and their art another: permissive for the parts they built on, all rights reserved for the parts they drew. Why split it like that, and what does the split let you do that one license covering everything would not?

A permissive license is irreversible. Once you publish under it you cannot take the permission back, and anyone who already took it keeps it forever. What does that make the moment you choose one — and why do people still release under permissive licenses on purpose?

Concept Lab ~15 min

Open source and your fork. The starter repo ships a LICENSE file — open yours now (your fork's repo, the file called LICENSE). Read the first line, because it is probably not what you would guess: this project is under the Apache License 2.0, not MIT.

Both are permissive licenses — they let you do almost anything — but Apache 2.0 is the more formal of the two. Here is the phrase from it that does the real work, quoted from section 2 of the file you just opened:

...a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge,
royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce,
prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly
perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work...

That one sentence is why your fork was legal, why you may sell 8.6's build on itch.io, and why nobody can revoke that permission later. In exchange you owe two things: keep the notices, and state that you changed the files. Apache also carries an explicit patent grant that MIT has no clause for at all — a difference that matters enormously to companies. Not all licenses are this permissive:

LicenseYou mayYou must
MITAnything, even commercialKeep the notice
Apache 2.0 (your starter)Anything, even commercialKeep the notice, state your changes, and pass on the patent grant
GPL (copyleft)Use and modify freelyShare YOUR version under GPL too
CC BY / CC BY-SA (assets)Remix art/musicCredit the author; SA = share alike
Proprietary / "all rights reserved"Nothing without permissionAsk first

Attribution is the social contract. Your game uses the starter's code and possibly others' sprites. A CREDITS file is how the chain of gratitude works — and the exam's "impact" questions are exactly this: software is built in communities, licenses are their rules of the road.

Socratic

GPL's copyleft says: fork freely, but your fork must stay open. Apache 2.0 — the license you just read — says: fork freely, close it if you want. Argue ONE side: which produces more good in the world, and why would a company pick Apache while Linux picked GPL? (There is no right answer; there is an argued answer.)

Concept Lab II ~15 min

Digital divide — who is missing from this room. You build games on school machines with fast wifi. The exam's IOC-1 questions ask who is NOT at the table: students without home internet (your 9.7 minimum spec decision is about access, not just fps), people whose language the tutorials do not speak, the elderly on interfaces designed by 24-year-olds, whole countries whose news feeds run on algorithms they cannot audit. Software scales the designer's assumptions to millions.

Your data and the games you play. Free games monetize attention: they measure session time, churn, and what makes players return (your own 9.5 dataset is that measurement, done honestly and locally — imagine it sent nightly to a server, aggregated across 40 million players, and used to schedule "limited-time" events at YOUR 11pm). The exam calls this targeted and sometimes predatory design. Knowing the pattern is the defense.

Bias with consequences. Connect to 9.6: a hiring algorithm trained on past hires inherits past exclusion; a game tutorial with only one skin tone teaches who it expects. When your jam games reach the showcase (10.1f), your classmates are the users — what assumptions did YOU bake in without noticing? Name one out loud.

Checkpoint — before moving on, you must be able to:

Reference Docs

Need a deeper explanation? These pages cover the same concepts:

Next unit: 10.1a — 2-Button Jam: Kickoff & Pitch — jam season begins.

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