Credit the parts library properly, add a licence, and rename to LDBuilder

[thebuilder]

Started as "are there any legal issues with this project?" The answer was mostly no: the LEGO Fair Play disclaimer, the CCAL gate on OMR sets, and the preserved 0 Author: lines were all already right. Five things were not.

Attribution was wrong in four ways

All four came out of CAreadme.txt in the parts library rather than the summary page, which is less specific.

The licence version. The footer and README said CC BY 2.0. Every part that actually ships says CC BY 4.0 or CC BY 2.0 and CC BY 4.0; only the OMR models are CCAL 2.0, which the same document defines as a deprecated spelling of CC BY 2.0. So the credit named the wrong licence for most of the geometry on screen. Both are named now, and pnpm ldraw:pack writes credit lines to match.

No modification notice. CAreadme draws the derivative-work line in exactly the place this project sits on the far side of: a model that references library parts is not a derivative work, one that includes their source "in any form" is. Packing inlines part files, so every .mpd under public/ is a derivative, and CC BY asks a derivative to say it changed the work. Each packed root now carries a notice. Diffs on the packed files are +7 lines each and nothing else, which is the check that no geometry moved.

Placement took two tries and is the one subtle bit: the notice cannot go above the first 0 FILE, because LDrawLoader only treats that directive as the main model on line 0 and anything earlier demotes the whole model to an embedded file nothing references. It cannot go inside the header either, which is read positionally. It sits directly under the !LICENSE line it qualifies.

The viewer credited nobody. A deep link to /build/galaxy-explorer showed no sign of who built it, though the gallery card did. credit now rides on ModelData, so it travels with the model rather than being glued into the title string.

The exporter signed other people's work. Free build stamped 0 Author: LDraw Builder and a CCAL licence line onto the user's own model. Both are gone. That file also owes the library nothing: it references parts and embeds none, which is the case CAreadme names as not a derivative work.

No LICENSE at all

On a public repo that means all rights reserved, so nobody could legally fork it. A blanket licence would have been wrong too, since the packed .mpd files carry other people's CC BY work and are not ours to relicense. LICENSE is split: MIT for src/, scripts/, demo-models/ and root config, then the CC BY data called out path by path with which version applies and why it varies at 2023-03-05, the two OMR sets named with their authors, and a note that the MIT grant licenses neither trademark.

NOTICES.md covers dependencies and is generated by pnpm notices, because a notices file's only real failure mode is going stale when a dependency changes. Three things a hand-written one would have missed:

• The inventory was machine-specific. Only this machine's prebuilt binaries install, so a notice generated on a Mac omits what a Linux deployment ships. Families come from the lockfile instead: 34 variants across three, of which 3 install locally. Siblings match on the stripped prefix rather than startsWith, or @img/sharp-* swallows @img/sharp-libvips-* and reports Apache-2.0 for ten LGPL packages.
• libvips is LGPL-3.0-or-later, the only copyleft in the tree, so it gets its own section. The claim that nothing imports next/image is checked with git grep at generation time rather than asserted, so it cannot rot.
• caniuse-lite is CC-BY-4.0 and needs attribution like the parts library does.

The rename

Quality, Brand, and the LDraw Name says LDraw "should not appear in a program's title and/or URL", and that LDraw.org cannot grant an exception because it licenses the mark from the Jessiman Estate. It suggests an LD prefix, which is where LDView and LDCad get their names. The README records that reasoning next to the trademark notice so it does not get reverted as a typo later. The packed-file notice deliberately carries no tool name, so it did not have to change.

Repairs this needed along the way

• pnpm ldraw:palette was broken on main, passing index where packModel wants resolve, so it could not run at all. That blocked repacking the palette, which inlines 642 part files and needs the notice as much as a model does.
• jsdom was declared but not installed, so 10 test files silently never ran and pnpm test reported 354 passing. The real number was 543 before this branch, 592 after.
• disposeModel had no tests. Worth fixing for its own sake: nothing observable goes wrong when teardown is incomplete, it just leaks a few hundred megabytes per model opened.

For the reviewer

• Rebased onto 05d1d17. The three upstream commits touched nearly every file here, so conflicts were resolved rather than merged blindly: the redesigned favicon and the tightened README wording are kept, only the name changed; the deleted wall demo stays deleted and the manifest was regenerated rather than hand-merged.
• Every commit passes pnpm check on its own, not just the branch head.
• pnpm run audit passes with no introduced findings. Getting there moved the notices rules into scripts/lib/notices.mjs, pure and tested, with the CLI as the I/O half. That matches how ldraw-pack and omr-index are already split and is what lets the audit see the coverage.
• Verified in a browser, not just in tests: the footer, the gallery credits, the viewer's "Built by" line, and the free-build page loading the repacked palette.

On the wordmark, raised and settled. I earlier reported finding no wordmark; that was wrong. page.tsx puts three squares in LEGO's primaries beside the title, and main has since folded the same three colours into the favicon. Raised because it is the closest thing to a trade-dress question left in the project. Deliberately keeping it: with the name no longer echoing LEGO or LDraw, and a Fair Play disclaimer on every route of a non-commercial project, the palette on its own is not what creates the risk. Recorded here so it reads as a decision rather than an oversight, and so anyone reopening it starts from the reasoning instead of the colours.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
ldbuilder	Ready	Preview	Aug 28, 2026 11:22am