Three licences, three layers, and one nobody had noticed

Anyone can hold a position on open source. Showing the licence file is different. This page is the licensing actually in force across the estate — two licences across three layers, and what each one is for — followed by the reasoning behind the choices, and the one alignment question, found while building this page and since settled.

What is actually in force

The alignment question — decided: CC BY

The CC0 licence on the published-articles repository sat outside the CC BY rule that governs everything else in writing, and the working documents did not say whether that was a deliberate carve-out. Two readings were available, and both were published here until the author settled it:

The CC BY reasoning, which is documented

Four distinct arguments exist for the CC BY choice, and they are worth separating because they are not the same argument:

Alignment, not compliance. "The Creative Commons licence aligns with our zero-lock-in principle. We are already committed to zero lock-in and open standards. A project released entirely under CC BY 4.0, using open source tools, with no proprietary components — this is the natural extension of our existing values."

It is a hard rule, not a preference. Rule two of the writing discipline is a licence footer at the bottom of every document, and every day-index brief closes with it. That is what produced 1,100+ consistent footers — a rule, mechanically applied, which is why the CC0 divergence stood out as much as it did.

BY versus BY-SA was actively considered, and BY won. The question is recorded — "CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC BY 4.0 for the licence? BY-SA encourages derivatives to stay open; BY is more permissive" — and permissive was chosen. That is a real decision, and it sits interestingly against the survivability argument, which is in effect the claim that licences are the weakest of the structural protections. If you believe that, choosing the more permissive licence costs you less than it appears to, because you were never relying on the licence to do the work.

Openness is a credibility asset, and it is backed. "The transparency claim is credible because it is backed (the CC BY 4.0 corpus, the public briefs, rendering from a public vault)."

Downstream licences are respected

"CC BY 4.0 for the article and most contents; original source materials retain their own licences." In practice that means Wardley-map briefs carry a bespoke footer crediting Simon Wardley's own Creative Commons terms — a small discipline, and a good illustration of the general rule: your licence governs your contribution, not the material you built on.

This site applies the same rule and states it explicitly, because it quotes the open-source world at length: Wikipedia material is CC BY-SA and is quoted with attribution rather than adapted; project documentation and vendor reports are cited with source, date and caveat rather than reproduced; charts from all-rights-reserved analyst reports are never reproduced at all.

The line: everything open, except at the customer

"The line is very simple: everything is open source, so you do not even have that conversation. It is a key pillar. It is not for everybody, some investors will not like it, but you find the ones who do, and it is a good match. You can always commercial-license or relicense everything for a customer who wants it, but the core is all open source. No part of the company or the ecosystem is not open source."

Note the mechanism hidden in the middle of that: "you can always commercial-license or relicense everything for a customer who wants it." That is only possible because a single company holds the copyright — which is exactly the structure leg one of our own stress test asks about. The flexibility and the exposure are the same fact viewed from two sides, and it is worth being clear that they cannot be separated.

And the commercial hook is explicitly not the code: "We do not have that lock-in on technology, and that is fundamental. The natural line is a business line, and that is okay: that is when you charge to maintain it. It is the hook, but a hook based on value… The customer's schemas can be closed, a lot of their data is closed, but our schemas are open."

Whether the customer subset makes this open core rather than packaging is a separate page with a one-question test.

What has actually been published