Is it okay to put the C API libraries in a public GitHub repo?

[stevensrmiller]

@DanRathbun

Elsewhere however he’s included a License file that quotes the standard MIT License with his own copyright. This could lead to others thinking they can treat the SketchUp C API files (which are in a subfolder of the one in which resides the MIT License,) as if they are distributed under the MIT License.

Yes, that’s a problem with a lot of open-source licenses. They seem to be written with the assumption that you are free to distribute everything it takes to run your application, without obligation to anyone who wrote some part of it that you are using, and under some other license. What we need is a version of the MIT license that starts like this:

Except for those files listed in Appendix A, permission is hereby granted, free of charge…

Then Appendix A should read like this:

Trimble, Inc., holds the copyright to the following files. You are authorized to have copies of these files and to use them as necessary to use this software. You may not make other use of these files, nor may you distribute them, without permission from Trimble, Inc.:

SketchUpAPI.dll
SketchUpCommonPreferences.dll

You know, the “API” and those two files are not the same thing. I think I’ll go ahead and include the files on the repo, with that additional license term. I’m only distributing the files that way, not the API and not the entire SDK.