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# Why does pkg.go.dev require a detected license to show docs? Why doesn't godoc.org?

The teams working on the proxy and on pkg.go.dev have spent a lot of time talking to Google's lawyers about what we can and can't do with Go source code downloaded from the internet. The rule we've been given to follow is that serving a pretty HTML version of the docs is displaying a modified version of the original, and we can only do that if there's a recognized known-good license that gives us that permission.

When we adopted godoc.org from Gary Burd back in 2014, it did not occur to any of us to put it through that kind of review. If we had, maybe the community would have gone through this licensing pain earlier. For now we are focusing on making changes to pkg.go.dev rather than correcting past mistakes on godoc.org.