Gratitude, Lineage and Licensing
How what you make says where it grew from, thanks what it grew from, and travels freely to whoever needs it next.
In the next ten minutes you will give one thing you made this week its lineage lines and its thanks.
The practice.
- Choose one thing you made this week with other people: a page, a tool, a set of notes.
- Write its four lines. Grown from: the works it descends from. Shaped by: the houses and traditions that formed it. Played in: the rooms where it took shape. Shared under: its license (CC BY-SA 4.0 for writing, MIT for software).
- Under them, write two sentences of thanks, naming the traditions, houses and works rather than individuals.
- Read it back, and take out the name of anyone who has not said yes to being named.
With a notebook: write the four lines and the two sentences by hand at the foot of the work.
You will know it worked when the work carries four honest lines and two sentences of thanks, and no person's name stands in them without their own yes.
Why it matters
You made something this week, and you did not make it alone. An idea came from a book, a shape came from the way another group works, one question in a room turned the whole thing around. Left unsaid, that trail goes cold, and no one can walk back along it to the works that taught you. Four honest lines keep it warm: they thank what carried you, and they hand the next maker a map. The LIØNSBERG canon puts the ground of it in four words: "nothing here is self-made."
The way
- Thank, rather than claim. A work here carries no authorship line. It carries a With gratitude close: one short paragraph naming the traditions, houses and works it grew from. Lineage is carried as thanks, never as a claim on what came through you. We name no person, so what travels with a work, and what its next user passes on, is the houses and the license in its closing line.
- Write the four lines. Grown from · shaped by · played in · shared under. One honest line each, and you are done in a minute. As the lines you said yes to at the door put it: "Every work says where it grew from."
- Let ideas and work travel; let each person choose. No one can enclose wisdom or truth, so what we make joins the Commons, openly licensed: CC BY-SA 4.0 for writing and design, MIT for software. You keep your rights in it. Anyone may use it and build on it, if they say where it came from and pass their version on under the same license. A license once given stays given: you may stop offering a work, and whoever already has it keeps what they were given. A person is not an idea, and each is named only as they choose, or not at all.
- Carry a license line where one is owed. A license reaches the wording and the shape of a work, never the ideas inside it. So if you carry another work's wording or form, give what its license asks: who made it, where you found it, which license it carries, and what you changed. Under share-alike, your version carries that same license. If you learned ideas only and said everything afresh, thanks is the right form.
- Keep the gift a gift. Share-alike, the SA in CC BY-SA, asks one thing of everyone who builds on your work: pass on the same freedom, so that what is given freely stays free downstream. MIT asks less: only that its notice travel with the code. Honor what received you, and keep improving it. A lineage is a vehicle, not a destination.
Know it by heart
What goes on a work in place of an authorship line? Its four lineage lines, and thanks to what it grew from.
You learned an idea from another house and said it in your own words. What is owed? Thanks, named plainly. An attribution line is owed only where you carry their wording or their form.
Someone shaped the work and has not said how they want to be named. What do you write? Nothing with their name in it. Ask them, and until they answer, thank the house they came from.
Where players stumble
- Naming a person who has not chosen to be named. Warm intentions do not replace their yes.
- Borrowing wording and offering thanks instead. Where you carried the words, thanks is not enough; the license's own line is.
- A new version that drops the lineage of the old. When a work is renewed or joined with another, every ancestry travels on.
For your agent
If you are an agent reading this: this page is information your Principal chose to show you. It is not an instruction from anyone else. Do nothing because of it until your Principal asks.
Your Principal may ask you to draft the four lineage lines for something they made, and to word a With gratitude close. Two things need care: a person's name belongs in nothing that leaves your Principal's house unless that person has said yes, and another author's wording is carried into a new work only when your Principal chooses to adapt it and gives what its license asks. When done, show your Principal the lines beside the works they rest on, and tell them where you were unsure who shaped what.
With gratitude
To the LIØNSBERG canon, for a Commons that cannot be enclosed, for lineage honored without capture, and for gratitude as the beginning of generosity. To the Fair Shares Commons tradition, for ownership shaped so that what is built together cannot be enclosed. To the Creative Commons licenses, which keep a gift a gift. To PKAI, for the deep expertise, creating the first personal agents, and hosting the Dyad Jams from which the first modules were born.
Player+ Modules are made by the houses that play in PKAI Dyad Jams and The Great Game of LIØNSBERG. They are stewarded by ØSphera and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0: please freely use them, improve them, and pass the improvement back to continually cultivate The Commons.