About
What this is
World of Modcraft is a modding platform being built for a classic-era ("3.3.5a") World of Warcraft private server: a forked client, a forked server, a small shared runtime kernel that mods program against, and this portal, which turns a published mod's own git repository into a page here.
Nothing on this site is Blizzard-owned. Mods on this platform may only ship their own original assets — no extracted, edited or re-created Blizzard game data of any kind. That rule exists because private servers already sit in a legal grey area, and the project's only defensible position is to never distribute a single byte Blizzard owns.
Development status
This platform is in development. There is no kernel yet, no client/server fork release, and no launcher — so nothing here can be installed and run today. What exists is the publishing side: a registry that records mods and their versions, an archival pipeline that keeps a mod's source safe even if its author's repository disappears, and this generated site. When a mod page shows an "Install" button, it links to the archived source you'd need, and is explicit that the launcher itself isn't built yet.
Every decision behind how this platform works — and why it works that way rather than some other way — is written down as it's made. Read the decision log for the reasoning, including the decisions that shaped this very site.
Licensing, in plain language
Three different kinds of code live in and around this platform, and each uses a different licence on purpose. None of this is legal advice — read the actual licence text linked below for anything that matters to you — but here is what each choice is for.
The platform itself
AGPL-3.0-or-later
The server fork, the client fork, the shared kernel, the launcher, this site's own generator, and the build/registry tooling are all AGPL. AGPL is a "copyleft" licence: anyone can run this software, study it and modify it, but if they change it and let other people use their modified version — including over a network, which is the part plain GPL doesn't cover — they have to share those changes too. In practice, this guarantees a closed, proprietary "World of Modcraft" fork can never exist: any competing version has to stay open, the same way this one is.
The mod-development SDK
MIT, with a linking clause
The headers, interface definitions, generated bindings, mod project templates and CLI library that a mod author actually codes against are MIT-licensed — about as permissive as licences get — plus one explicit clause: using the SDK the normal way (calling its published interface from your own mod) does not make your mod a "derivative work" of the AGPL kernel underneath it. Without that clause, AGPL's copyleft could arguably reach up through the SDK into every mod built with it, which would force every mod to be AGPL too. The clause exists specifically so that doesn't happen.
Individual mods
Any OSI-approved open-source licence
A mod's author can choose any licence on the official OSI-approved list — MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL, and dozens more all qualify. The one thing that's notallowed is a closed-source or "all rights reserved" mod: publishing here requires the source to be genuinely open. Two knock-on rules: an "unsafe-tier" plugin (one that touches lower-level, riskier parts of the kernel and therefore includes AGPL-licensed headers) must use an AGPL-compatible licence itself; and a packaged legacy addon must allow repackaging. Ordinary mods are free to pick whatever open licence suits them.
Why split it this way? "Open" can mean two different things — permissive (anyone can do anything, including close it off again later) or copyleft (it has to stay open). Copyleft on the parts this project owns means the platform itself can never be taken closed- source by anyone, including a future maintainer. Leaving mod authors free to choose their own licence avoids scaring away contributors who don't want AGPL's obligations for their own work — the platform's openness policy (not licence terms) is what already guarantees every published mod stays source-available.