Attribution and License Compliance for Original Resource Authors

[hesreallyhim]

Hi @davila7,

I'm just reaching out regarding some concerns about the LICENSE/attribution information that you have for this repo and marketplace. Obviously, I think you've done a great job curating these resources, which is why I added them to my own list, and I trust you're acting in good faith, so I hope that you will adopt these suggestions in the interests of supporting the open-source community.

1. Individual Resource Attribution: First, thank you for acknowledging me in your README - although I didn't author any of those resources, it does acknowledge the effort I put in to maintaining the list. However, the problem arises because I didn't author any of those resources - they are all authored by various people who decided on their own licenses - and as far as I can tell, those licenses are generally not being upheld here. Any resources that you're distributing that come from my list are subject to the author's own license and those authors deserve their own attribution/credit. So, attributing those commands to me is probably a little misleading, and definitely does not respect the licenses of the original authors (even if they are MIT-licensed, as indeed most of them are).
   As you may or may not have noticed, one thing I check when I add a resource is its license information - most resources are MIT, and for those I even download and host my own copy on the repository. However, some are more restrictive, and they are not copied into my repository, because although providing a link is one thing, re-hosting/re-distributing is another. AFAICT, your project involves the latter, so you must respect the license of those original authors, not of myself. The same applies to the LICENSE of your own project. Your license file only includes attribution information for yourself. Therefore, anyone who uses your repository for their own marketplace (as indeed I am seeing already is happening) may give you a nod, they will probably not even realize that they are violating the downstream rights of the original authors...

2. Because I saw what was coming, I decided to change the license of my repo to a much more restrictive one. This doesn't affect your project, as far as I can tell from the history, because I can't retroactively remove anything that happened or was adopted before the license change, but I would ask you to update the information in the README that awesome-claude-code is not CC 1.0 anymore. This is regrettable, but I saw it as a necessary evil to prevent reckless appropriation (not in your case, but I had already begun to see some bad actors popping up). Most of these authors had decided on an MIT license, so they were already basically granting the right for anyone to commercialize their work, with the caveat that their own license also be passed along.

3. Regarding specific resources, almost all of the ones that I identified (slash-commands mainly I think, about 20 of them at first), are MIT-licensed. So to rectify this issue would simply require either re-distributing their own licenses somewhere in your repo/marketplace, or somewhere in your LICENSE file. (I think there are various options for how to do this, e.g. you could have a secondary_licenses directory and place them in there, or provide specific attribution information in the marketplace/package files that somehow makes clear the provenance.) A very small number of the commands use copyleft licenses, and one is copyright, so that is more problematic. If you want to follow up about specifics, feel free to email me or however you like. I've also found one repository that is derived from yours and has systematically rewritten the git history, presumably to erase your provenance. If that bothers you, hopefully you'll see why this is something worth caring about.

The license information for all the resources in my list is clearly indicated in a simple tabular format here. I'd even be happy to open a PR to copy the license files from the original authors over to a /LICENSES/ directory, or however you choose to do it.

I hope you'll adopt these suggestions in the spirit they're intended, which is just to give credit where it's due - those authors have mainly decided to allow others to use their work in any way the like, so I don't think anything you're doing is infringement, I just worry especially about the downstream effects of people who are copying your marketplace, and the copies of copies, and so on, and then all the effort of the original authors is erased (as I mentioned, I already found one project that is doing precisely that to your own repo). Your project was (rightly, in my opinion), highlighted by Anthropic itself in a public press release, so I think that makes it even more important to uphold these standards. Let me know if you think I'm mistaken about this, or if you want any help implementing a "fix", I don't mind doing the legwork.

Thanks,
Him

[davila7]

Hi @hesreallyhim,

Thanks for pointing this out, totally agree that proper attribution to the original authors is important.
I appreciate the way you explained it.
Please go ahead and open the PR to include the original licenses or attribution structure (e.g. /LICENSES).
I’ll also update the README accordingly.

Thanks for the help and for supporting open-source standards! 🙏

• Daniel

[hesreallyhim]

@davila7 I've gone one incoming thanks for being open to this