# Credits & provenance

Forbric is a clean-room unified mod loader. It stands on the work of two prior loaders.

## Fabric Loader — substrate (reused, not vendored)

Forbric's core — class loading, mod discovery and dependency solving, metadata
parsing, the Mixin service, the game-provider framework — **is**
[Fabric Loader](https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-loader), © FabricMC, licensed
under the **Apache License 2.0**.

This repository does not contain that source. `bootstrap.sh` clones the upstream
repository, at the release pinned as `fabric_loader_ref` in `gradle.properties`,
into a sibling `fabric-loader/` directory, and `build.gradle` compiles its source
roots alongside Forbric's own. So no file here carries a FabricMC copyright
header — but the jar the build produces does contain compiled FabricMC code,
which remains © FabricMC under the Apache License 2.0. See [NOTICE](NOTICE).

The eight changes Forbric needs in upstream's code live as unified diffs in
`patches/fabric-loader/`, applied by `bootstrap.sh` and re-verified against the
pinned release by `run/verify-substrate-patches.sh`. Keeping them as patches,
rather than editing a vendored copy, is what makes "what did Forbric change in
Fabric Loader" a one-command question.

The mod-facing API packages (`net.fabricmc.api`, `net.fabricmc.loader.api`) are
untouched by those patches and keep their original names, so existing Fabric mods
link against them unchanged.

## Forge Mod Loader (FML) — behavioural reference only (NOT reused)

Forbric's Forge-compatibility code was written **clean-room** from public
specifications. [FML](https://github.com/MinecraftForge/FML), © cpw and
contributors, licensed under the **GNU LGPL v2.1 or later**, was read only as a
behavioural reference for:

- Access Transformer semantics and the `.cfg` directive grammar,
- SRG naming behaviour,
- the coremod ordering algorithm (sort index + topological pre-depends),
- Maven version-range semantics,
- the Forge mod lifecycle / event model.

**No FML source code is included in Forbric.** This keeps the distribution free
of LGPL-derived code, so the whole project remains Apache-2.0. The Forge-side
support targets **modern** Forge (`mods.toml` + ModLauncher) and NeoForge
(`neoforge.mods.toml`), not the 1.8-era FML that was used as a reference.

> Maintainer note: do not copy code from FML (or any other LGPL/GPL source) into
> the `net.forbric.*` tree. If LGPL-derived code is ever genuinely needed, it must
> live in a separately-licensed sibling module with its own `LICENSE-lgpl.txt` and
> a source-availability offer.

## MinecraftForge and NeoForge runtimes — supplied at run time, not redistributed

Forbric loads the genuine MinecraftForge and NeoForge runtimes rather than
reimplementing them. Those jars are not in this repository and are not
distributed with it: the scripts under `run/` fetch them from their upstream
Maven repositories (`maven.minecraftforge.net`, `maven.neoforged.net`) and build
the patched Minecraft base they need on the machine that runs them. Forbric's own
drivers (`ForbricMinecraftForgeRuntime`, `ForbricNeoForgeRuntime`) reach them
reflection-only, so the loader carries no compile-time dependency on either.

## Mappings

See [MAPPINGS.md](MAPPINGS.md). Forbric never bundles MCP data.