The news
Good news about MBB's mods and models, which have been in a legally problematic state of being not licensed for a while: They are now licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0! This follows after my private correspondence with him. Also, he has recently changed his GitHub account name to
mbruchert - previously it was
mbblp. You may need to update git remotes for any of his mods that you have previously cloned or recorded as submodules. Although GitHub may support aliases for a while, don't expect them to work indefinitely.
Email addresses have been redacted to prevent spam but I can forward the email to anybody who asks. This grant of license means we can't expect any copyright takedowns to occur - not that we ever really did, but now we can be sure. All times below are in Australian Eastern Time. Also it means that forks of his mod are now legal and could probably pass the requirements to be put on ContentDB.
First my original email:
2021-12-13 18:32
Blockhead wrote:
Hi MBB,
I know it's been a long time, and you probably don't have time or
interest for AdvTrains any more, but there's one thing bugging us in the
community about your old train mods, and it's that they are not
licensed. This means under copyright law we can't legally rehost them or
put them on our own GitHub pages and make changes and improvements.
Could you please license your mods under, say, CC-BY-SA 3.0. Even if you
could reply to this email and say "all my AdvTrains work on GitHub and
Minetest Forums is hereby licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0" (or other
license); or log into the Minetest Forums just once to post that on the
AdvTrains thread. That would really help us out to do the right thing by
the law, thank you.
I hope you're well, and I hope I have made it easy to respond quickly
and move on so I don't take up much of your time,
Blockhead,
Advtrains contributor
And the reply:
2022-05-09 03:38
MBB wrote:
I am sorry that it took me so long to answer.
All my AdvTrains work on GitHub and
Minetest Forums is hereby licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0
I hope that this helps:)
What now?
Some one or group should step forward as maintainer(s) for his mods, possibly also adding more mods or assets that are not currently available on git such as some of the ones in this thread. You don't have to git host the files on GitHub, other sites are available - but a GitHub fork would be the easiest to find. Some of the big sites like GitHub and GitLab have organisations. Maybe the advtrains organisation recently formed on
NotABug is a good fit for these mods, given how tied to the early (especially 2017/2018) development of advtrains that they are.
You can git commit with someone else's authorship information and an old date - git actually records author and committer separately even though it usually only shows authorship with
git log; so you can open a repository and commit with the date of the upload to Minetest forums.
Also, a LICENSE file should be added and attribute the mods to © MBB/Mathis Brüchert (and contributors in many cases), giving the copyright year as the year of the latest commit or the date of upload to forums in the absence of git information.
Finally, this person/organisation should look at getting the mods on ContentDB and maintenance and improvement items (I know there are a few), without worrying about copywrong and hopefully fewer issues around disorganised forks by individuals that have previously contributed to MBB's mods such as myself, Amelaye or or Andrey01.