MIT License check as part of Course automation

[gt-thetic]

Following the huddle at GDevCon 6, it came to my attention that course contributors are agreeing to have the course content submitted under the MIT License. It would make sense if the automated pipeline that runs after a course is committed automatically checks whether the MIT License is present in the repo. An MIT license is part of the initial repo, however, any developer could remove it accidentally.

[j-medland]

I think I would be open to the course material being under a more strict Non-Permissive licence such as GPL or CC BY-SA if the author wished.

That would allow for commercial use but force people to share their course content with the people taking the course.

Thoughts?

[gt-thetic]

The purpose of the issue is to flag that the repo must have a license of an open nature, rather than no license. I believe you would be the right person to weigh in on which licenses were the right ones to check for.

[j-medland]

** Dusts off my "Not a Lawyer" hat ** - yeah.

I reckon we can have two/three to choose from, some documentation saying "please use one of these, here is why you might choose one over the other" and some CI to verify that one of those is present.

If course authors wanted to discuss then we could see what licencing they were hoping to use.

Authors might want to ship 3rd-party licenced code which would also all need its licence files present - but that wouldn't be a task for automation to check.