gig-line/Docs/licensing.md

Licensing

Licensing is tracked in four separate layers. Do not merge them; each has different obligations.

Layer	What it covers	Status
Project code	Project-owned code in Game/Source, Tools/, and Geo/ scripts	CC0 1.0, chosen by the project owner.
Project art	Blender sources, baked textures, exported meshes	Project-owned art is CC0 1.0; third-party contributions retain their own terms. See the asset notices.
Engine	Unreal Engine	Proprietary / source-available. Not redistributable as engine source. Distribution follows Epic's terms.
Geographic data	OSM extract, elevation data	ODbL and the elevation provider's own licence. Attribution and share-alike review required before distributing a derived database.

Project-owned documentation is also dedicated under CC0 1.0. Third-party material retains its own terms.

Rules

1. An asset whose licence cannot be verified does not get committed. Record it as unresolved in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and replace it with a redistributable asset before the release it would ship in.
2. Reference photography is dev-only material and is never committed. It lives in the gitignored Art/reference/ tree, is used for internal, private development only, and is not shipped or baked into shipped textures. Local reference notes are also excluded from version control.
3. OSM is layout data only. Do not treat it as authoritative for façades, heights, or pavement detail, and do not import it as a texture or panorama source.
4. Never use extracted Google imagery, Street View, or geometry. No exception.
5. Attribution: "© OpenStreetMap contributors" with a link to https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright appears in the shipped build's UI (a 0.1.0 release check) and in the notices.
6. Credentials, licence keys, and account tokens never enter the repository. Engine licence acceptance is recorded by date and account email only.

Open decisions

• ODbL posture. Decide whether distributed builds contain a derived geographic database (a modified OSM extract) or only rendered geometry. The answer changes the share-alike obligations for the shipped product. Record the decision here and in the release notes.
• Reference photography retention. Decided 2026-11-06: reference images are not committed. Licensing is not the gate for local, private development use, so images are simply kept out of the repository (Art/reference/ is gitignored) and their provenance stays in the local sidecars. The gate moves to the shipped output: if a shipped asset would derive from a reference photograph, that is a release-time licensing decision, recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md before the asset ships.

Provenance sources

Primary record: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for anything committed or shipped. Evidence notes and per-file provenance for local reference images remain private and untracked.