FantasyWiki is licensed under the GNU AGPL v3.0
Status: decided when the repository was created (2025-12-14), recorded 2026-09-21.
FantasyWiki's source is published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (LICENSE). Anyone may run, study, change and redistribute it, and anyone who offers a modified FantasyWiki to players over a network must offer those players the modified source.
The constraint that shaped it
FantasyWiki is not distributed; it is served. Nobody installs it. A player opens a page, and the code runs on Cloudflare. That one fact decides between the licences, because the obligations of most of them are triggered by distribution, and a hosted game never distributes anything.
Options considered
| Licence | What a third party hosting a modified copy owes its players | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| MIT / Apache-2.0 | Nothing | Rejected: a closed fork of an open game is allowed |
| GPL-3.0 | Nothing, because serving is not distribution | Rejected: copyleft in name, permissive in practice for a web service |
| AGPL-3.0 | The modified source, to every player it serves | Chosen |
| Proprietary | Not applicable, nobody may host it | Rejected: the project is public and is meant to be read, studied and played with |
GPL-3.0 is the instructive rejection. It is the licence usually meant by "copyleft", and for this project it would protect nothing: a host could change the scoring, the economy or the data it keeps about players and never publish a line, because no copy of the program ever leaves its servers. The AGPL's section 13 closes exactly that gap, and it is the only difference between the two that matters here.
Consequences
- The deployed service carries its source link. The app's footer links to this repository (
frontend/src/layout/InfoFooter.vue); removing it would put the deployment itself out of compliance. It is listed as a constraint in Requirements. - Dependencies must be compatible, and are. The shipped dependencies are under permissive licences (MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSD), which may be combined into an AGPL work. A dependency under a licence that forbids that, or under the SSPL, cannot be added.
- Contributions arrive under the same terms. There is no contributor licence agreement; a pull request is a contribution under the AGPL, which is what the licence's own section 5 provides for. See Development Process.
- The licence covers the code, not the data. Article text shown in the app is Wikipedia's, under CC BY-SA, and pageview counts are Wikimedia's, under CC0. Neither becomes AGPL by passing through FantasyWiki.
Related
- Development Process: how a contribution reaches
master - Release Process: what is published, and where