How to appropriately include license for CSS files

[createyourpersonalaccount]

Hello,

I use highlight.js with node to highlight source code blocks in my blog on the backend. The only file I need to serve users is the css theme. What is the license of the theme?

For example, if I use atom-one-light.css, I see the following notice (not available in the min file):

Atom One Light by Daniel Gamage
Original One Light Syntax theme from https://github.com/atom/one-light-syntax

So, what is the license? Is it BSD-3 because that's what highlight.js comes with? Is it whatever Daniel Gamage had? If you can help me understand this issue I would appreciate it.

[joshgoebel]

I'm no license expert but my thinking would be that when anything is merged/committed to the project that it would come under our licensing. I'd be happy to make that explicit also if needed - all our themes should be open for any use, personal, professional, etc...

Now the Base64 themes could be different since we just pulled those from an entirely different project. Though to be fair the original Base16 project was MIT: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16

I probably wouldn't worry unless your a big huge corporation and wanted to reach out to the original author just to get their blessing.

[joshgoebel]

Does that help?

[createyourpersonalaccount]

@joshgoebel Thanks for the response. For example here's what Base16 license has (MIT):

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

You could include the entire license text in the CSS file in a comment (together with the attribution line "Copyright (C) 2012 Chris Kempson") but obviously that bloats the serving of the file. Other options are either only including it in the non-min CSS file or having it entirely detached in a LICENSES/ directory that explains which license corresponds to which files.

What I think is the case is that including only your license is not appropriate. In fact in my case, because I'm serving the CSS file, I do not need to include your license at all, AFAIK the output of highlight.js is not licensed under your license, so I do not need to include your license in my served HTML files. I would however need to include the license of the CSS file.

I could be wrong about this. My blog is on a repo on GitHub, so I know that I need to include the appropriate licenses for everything. If I only served files over an HTTP server, then I'd have to include licenses embedded in the served files. If you look at what Google does in its index page, it has small copyright notices for every served JS code, things like:

/*
 Copyright The Closure Library Authors.
 SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
*/

I think that's what needs to be done here even for the minified files: an indication of the copyright owner and the license type.