Quick question regarding licensing of some themes: Seems like a lot of themes are ports of existing themes not necessarily owned by the theme author. However some of them are not including original license (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/airspace-hugo/ and https://themefisher.com/products/airspace-free-bootstrap-website-template/). Is there any process, how to report such issues? I don’t want to use a theme only to later discover that it has additional usage limitations… Or is this expected and is it responsibility of Hugo user to check theme origin?
Hmm, good spot. In fact, it would be safer to not use any theme that doesn’t have a license.
On the other hand the github repo is under Themefisher organization… so I am not sure. Maybe if this is released under MIT, it is MIT and that’s it. But it seems strange.
I wouldn’t accept that as legit. Each repo has to have a license file and a README saying what the license is (as a minimum). Some licenses recommend a summary in each file as well - I think Apache 2 does this. I prefer it when GitHub has recognised the license and lists it for the repo.
Though I admin I’ve probably a few where this isn’t the case as it took me a while to work out licensing for my code.
The theme in my original post has LICENSE.md. I was more perplexed by the fact that there is a quite limited version (personal use only) of the theme on its original website.
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You should report any license issues in the theme repo.
However …
For two themes in question we went round and round for about a year before we landed the licensing.
- The Hugo themes are MIT with a proper license
- That license is put there by the theme owner (so it is not ported by someone else)
- I cannot see any problem with him publishing the same theme in some other wrapping on his own “theme store”
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