Licensing

When creating learning content for MakeCode, we strongly recommend that you include a standard license in your content repository. This includes content that is served from a MakeCode website, commonly in the form of, but not limited to, these:

• Tutorials
• MakeCode projects and extensions repositories on GitHub
• Curriculum based on the use of MakeCode
• Skillmaps

Standard licenses

There are many standard licenses available to choose from to include with your content. You can explore the different license choices at https://choosealicense.com. Your choice depends on how restrictive or permissive you want the use of your content to be. With MakeCode related content, it’s best that you allow users enough freedom and flexibility to use what you’re offering without too many restrictions. The licenses that we recommend are those established by Creative Commons. You can view the general terms of each license and decide which one to use. In particular, these are the license types we suggest you use:

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

  CC BY

• Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)

  CC BY-ND

• MIT License

License file

As part of your content set, it’s typical to include a license file at the root of your file structure tree. Often this file is just named LICENSE. Inside this file is either the full legal text of the license or some text referring to a full license located elsewhere. For example, if you wish to use a CC BY license, your LICENSE file could contain:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Also, if you’re contributing a single document or just a few pages, you can simply state that your work is licensed by one of the licenses mentioned above. Include a license reference like this near the beginning of your document:

“This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.”

MakeCode extensions

Extensions for MakeCode, unlike other content types, MUST have the MIT license. For approval to have MakeCode load your extension, it is required that a LICENSE file containing the MIT license be present at the root of the extension repository.

Include a LICENSE file with the following text at the root of your extension repository:

MIT License

Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

This site, https://mit-license.org/, always contains the “official” text for the license.