Licenses and attribution
What other people's work this site sends to your browser, and under which license it travels.
History of Movies is a content site, so there is exactly one place other people's
software leaves our machines: the JavaScript and the webfonts that
historyofmovies.com sends to a visitor's browser. This file is the single
source of truth for what that work is and under which license it travels, and
/licenses/ renders it verbatim.
The test for what belongs here is "do these bytes leave our machines". Not "did we install it" — most of what this repo depends on runs at build time on a laptop or a CI runner, or inside the Cloudflare Worker that answers requests, and neither is distribution under any of the licenses involved. §2 is the other side of that test: those packages are listed as deliberately excluded rather than silently missing.
Everything owed here is a notice, nothing more. Every license involved — MIT and the SIL Open Font License — is permissive, and none of them is copyleft; but all of them make passing the notice on a condition of redistributing a copy, and a browser bundle is a copy.
1. Sent to a visitor's browser
1.1 JavaScript
The site renders on the server (prerendered into R2 for the curated pages, D1-backed SSR for the long tail), but a handful of components are interactive — the search box, the locale switcher, the "my library" marks — so Next.js ships React and its own client runtime to every visitor.
| Package | Version | License | Copyright |
|---|---|---|---|
next |
16.3.1 | MIT | Copyright (c) 2025 Vercel, Inc. |
react, react-dom |
19.2.4 | MIT | Copyright (c) Meta Platforms, Inc. and affiliates. |
Full MIT text in §4.1. Nothing else in site/'s dependency list reaches the
browser — see §2.
1.2 The three families the site is set in
site/src/components/SiteShell.js loads Fraunces (display), Inter (UI) and
Source Serif 4 (essay prose) through next/font/google, which downloads the
font binaries at build time and emits them into .next/static/media/*.woff2.
They are therefore served from historyofmovies.com, not from Google's CDN — that
is redistribution of the binaries, and the OFL requires the notice to travel with
them.
All three are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (full text in §4.2):
| Family | Copyright |
|---|---|
| Fraunces | Copyright 2018 The Fraunces Project Authors (https://github.com/undercasetype/Fraunces) |
| Inter | Copyright 2020 The Inter Project Authors (https://github.com/rsms/inter) |
| Source Serif 4 | Copyright 2014 The Source Serif 4 Project Authors (https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif) |
No font binary is committed to this repo, and no font is modified — the site ships the upstream files under their original names, so the Reserved Font Name clause (OFL §3) is not engaged.
CJK pages use no webfont at all: they fall to the system stacks declared in
site/src/app/globals.css, which are the reader's own fonts and are not ours to
license.
2. What is deliberately NOT here
site/, server- and build-time only. marked (MIT) parses the essay markdown
while the page is being rendered and its output is HTML — verified: no chunk under
_next/static/chunks/ contains it. sharp (Apache-2.0) renders the card/OG/poster
images during prebuild. tailwindcss, @tailwindcss/postcss and
@tailwindcss/typography (all MIT) are compilers: what ships is the CSS they
emit, which is this repo's own stylesheet, not their source. @opennextjs/cloudflare
and wrangler (both MIT) build and deploy the Worker. eslint,
eslint-config-next, globals (a table of platform global names, read by the
lint config), @playwright/test and @axe-core/playwright never leave the
machine that runs the tests.
data-engine/ in its entirety. cheerio, sharp, opencc-js and aws4fetch
run on Jun's laptop to build the master tables and upload assets. That layer is
never deployed and never served; nothing in it is distributed to anyone.
The Worker runtime. Answering HTTP with software's output is not distributing that software under any license here (none is AGPL), so the server half of the OpenNext bundle owes no notice. If any of the above ever starts being sent to a browser, it moves to §1 and its license text comes with it.
3. The film data and the imagery
Neither is software, so neither is covered by §1 — but both are other people's work, and where they came from belongs in the same document.
Film, person and award data is compiled from Wikidata (CC0 — no attribution
required, credited anyway) plus the published lists, polls and award records
enumerated in site/lib/sources.mjs and rendered on
/methodology/. No third-party list is
reproduced in full: the site cites individual placements as facts and computes its
own composite ordering from them (data-engine/config/weights.mjs). The scores,
the rankings, the slice definitions and the essays are this site's own editorial
work.
Poster and portrait imagery — 3,689 files at the time of writing — comes from
Wikimedia Commons. Roughly half is public domain or CC0; the rest carries a CC BY
or CC BY-SA license with a per-file attribution obligation. Each file's author and
license travel with it in data-engine/data/master/images.json and are printed
in the caption beneath the image on the page where it appears, which is where a
per-file notice has to be to be any use. That manifest, not this file, is the
authoritative per-image record.
4. Full license texts
4.1 MIT License
Reproduced once; only the copyright line differs between the rows in §1.1. The
text below is react/LICENSE as published — the same grant every MIT row above
carries, with its own holder's name in place of the line below.
MIT License
Copyright (c) Meta Platforms, Inc. and affiliates.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
4.2 SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1
Applies to all three families in §1.2, each under its own copyright line.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at:
https://openfontlicense.org
-----------------------------------------------------------
SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007
-----------------------------------------------------------
PREAMBLE
The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide
development of collaborative font projects, to support the font creation
efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide a free and
open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership
with others.
The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and
redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The
fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded,
redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved
names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives,
however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The
requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply
to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives.
DEFINITIONS
"Font Software" refers to the set of files released by the Copyright
Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may
include source files, build scripts and documentation.
"Reserved Font Name" refers to any names specified as such after the
copyright statement(s).
"Original Version" refers to the collection of Font Software components as
distributed by the Copyright Holder(s).
"Modified Version" refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting,
or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the
Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a
new environment.
"Author" refers to any designer, engineer, programmer, technical
writer or other person who contributed to the Font Software.
PERMISSION & CONDITIONS
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify,
redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font
Software, subject to the following conditions:
1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components,
in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.
2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be
included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.
3) No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font
Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding
Copyright Holder. This restriction only applies to the primary font name as
presented to the users.
4) The name(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) or the Author(s) of the Font
Software shall not be used to promote, endorse or advertise any
Modified Version, except to acknowledge the contribution(s) of the
Copyright Holder(s) and the Author(s) or with their explicit written
permission.
5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole,
must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be
distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to
remain under this license does not apply to any document created
using the Font Software.
TERMINATION
This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are
not met.
DISCLAIMER
THE FONT SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT
OF COPYRIGHT, PATENT, TRADEMARK, OR OTHER RIGHT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE FONT SOFTWARE OR FROM
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE FONT SOFTWARE.