Publishing an MIT sub-crate that I didn't make

Hi there, I have git cloned opengles_graphics, and it is under MIT license. I have made many modifications to it (basically updated it because it hasn't been updated in 2 years) and am planning to release it as part of a crate I have made, without removing any of the files in it's directory, i.e., it would still contain the original readme and license, so as far as I understand, republishing something under MIT is okay, and I don't have to worry about copyright issues etc., but I'm not very experienced with law (much less copyright laws) and want to be sure I don't get penalized for doing this.
Thanks - @OptimisticPeach

Legally, it's not a problem. However, there are community norms that you should worry about as well.
It looks like you've forked a fork. The original repository is here, and it has been updated recently and frequently.

I'd suggest you do the following, if you haven't done so already:

  • See how far your work is from the original repo.
  • Talk to the piston developers to see if they'll accept pull requests from you (open an issue). They have a pretty good contribution guide.
  • Talk to Drakulix to see why he forked and if the reason he forked is no longer applicable or maybe there was another reason he stopped working on it.

If you still think you'd like to publish this work, you'll have to decide on the crate name, unless you can convince someone upstream of you to give you their crate name (which I think is both bad practice and unlikely). Once you have that figured out, there should be no legal hurdles to you publishing this work.

This is actually a fork of opengl-graphics that is adapted for opengles, so it really is still applicable, but it is unfortunately very far from the original repo from which it was forked because as I mentioned it was created 2 years ago. I will talk to Drakulix about it because I'm not very adept at github pulls/forks and I don't think that they'll accept a pull request to something that is 70 commits off, and implements a different api.
So after that, from what I gather, I'm perfectly fine, as long as Drakulix is fine with it?

I honestly know very little about this space, but I had a look at the diff in Drakulix's repo and it's not that big a change. A lot of the changes don't even seem necessary (like removing support for WebGL).

Legally, you're fine either way, but I'd very much suggest you talk to the piston folks to see if they're interested in this work. The main reason is, if this can live in the original repo, you won't have to maintain it, or abandon it when you have to move on. They already support more than one target, so adding ES as another target might be natural for them (but I can't speak for them!).

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I wrote up an issue and have decided to publish it as part of my crate (But expressing explicitly that it's not all my work), but when (or if) opengles support is added to opengl_graphics I'll switch (Opengles support won't be added overnight, unless a miracle happens :smile:)
Thanks for the help!

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