License statement on generated code?

[sveltejs]

License statement on generated code?

[Rich-Harris]

This is kind of an interesting philosophical question. Normally the author of the code determines what license gets attached to it – if you use Svelte to generate code, who is the author of it? Presumably you are, since it's just a tool like any other (if you used autocomplete in your editor while typing code, you wouldn't consider the creator of the autocompletion logic to have any authorial claim – this is an extreme version of the same thing).

So, yeah – I would assume that @AfraidKnot has the right idea, and generated code doesn't fall under the MIT License (though it's complicated by the fact that it's generated from snippets that are covered under MIT). IANAL though, I'd be really interested to hear from anyone with a better understanding of this stuff.

[AfraidKnot]

Many compilers let the developer set the license of the generated code as they do with the input source code. I.E. the owners of the source have full control over the generated output. I do agree with @brodybits that a clarification or statement indicating the licensing of the generated code is needed.

[R2D221]

In my opinion, you can see Svelte as part of the compiler. What logic do we use when deciding the license of output generated by a compiler?

[Rich-Harris]

Will close this as I don't think there's anything particular Svelte needs to do here — it's basically doing a more extreme version of what Babel does. If anyone with legal expertise knows better and can advise then let us know!

[WofWca]

Here's the GPL's stance on this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF

So the generated code as a whole should not fall under the MIT license, but the runtime parts of Svelte do, so the license text should accompany them. Here's what LGPL says: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html#section4.

I guess then that a comment in the generated code needs to say something along the lines of this program uses Svelte, which is covered by the MIT license. See Svelte.LICENE.txt to make it clear that the license only applies to a part of it.

I'll try to do more research on how this can be properly automated.