License

The short public permission that travels with a work, saying what anyone else may do with it.

A licence is a standing answer to a question nobody should have to ask. Without one, the default is that a work may not be copied, adapted or built on, and every would-be user must find the maker and negotiate. With one, the permission is attached to the thing itself and travels wherever it goes.

What a licence reaches is the wording and the shape of a work — never the ideas inside it. Ideas are not licensable and are not ownable; they join the commons the moment they are spoken. So a licence is not the instrument that keeps knowledge free. It is the instrument that keeps the artefacts usable, and that is a narrower and more practical job than it is often made to carry.

In the rooms of this Game, licensing is settled at the door rather than argued afterward. One of the terms every person says yes to on the way in is that what is made together is openly licensed — share-alike for writing and design, permissive for software — and that authors remain authors. Anything a person carries that is not theirs to give away is declared before it comes into the room, with where it came from and whose terms apply.

A licence once given stays given. A maker may stop offering a work; whoever already holds it keeps what they were given. That irreversibility is a feature: it is what makes a licence something a stranger can rely on without knowing you.

Also called: openly licensed, licensing Stands on: Knowledge as commons · Terms · Consent Opens onto: CC BY-SA 4.0 · MIT · Attribution · Provenance · Declare · The six lines In play: door · Room Sources: the Player+ Modules' Lexicon and Entering the Field (draft) · Gratitude, Lineage and Licensing (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · lionsberg.wiki: Commons Open: the wider canon has no licence statement of its own; the terms in use come from the Little Book, the modules and the seed text.