The licence: take it, change it, pass it on
Everything on this site can be copied, changed, translated, printed and handed out — including by organisations that charge for their own work. There are two conditions, and both of them exist for the same reason: so that nobody can take this work, close it up, and sell it back to the people it was written for.
What you can do
| You can | Without asking anybody |
|---|---|
| Copy and share | Any page here, on paper or online, in full or in part, to as many people as you like. |
| Change it | Rewrite it for your country, your sector, your language, your group's own rules. |
| Use it in paid work | In a training session you charge for, a paid consultancy, a course, a funded project. |
| Sell printed copies | Print it and sell it, or include it in a paid handbook — as long as the conditions below are met. |
| Publish it yourself | Put it on your own website, intranet, noticeboard or wiki. |
The two conditions
- 1. Say where it came from Credit Solidarity Tools and link to the licence. A copy-paste line is further down this page. If you changed it, say what you changed — that is useful to the next group and it is honest.
- 2. Pass on the same freedom (this is the share-alike part) If you publish a changed version, it goes out under this same licence. Not a stricter one, not an "all rights reserved", not behind a paywall of its own. Whoever picks up your version gets exactly the freedom you got here.
That is the whole licence. You cannot add legal or technical restrictions on top of it — no licensing it to a company that then locks it down, no rights-management wrapper that stops copying, no "members only" version of a modified page.
The exact terms
| What | Which licence |
|---|---|
| Everything written — the guides, checklists, templates, tables and the wording on the pages | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) |
| Code and tools — the community energy dashboard and anything else we publish as software | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) |
The code licence is stronger on purpose. If someone runs a modified version of one of our tools as a service over a network, they must publish their changes. That is what stops a co-operative's own tool from becoming a platform that bills it.
The credit line to copy and paste
Adapted from Solidarity Tools (https://solidaritytools.com), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: [say what you changed].
If you are sharing something unchanged, one line is enough: Source: Solidarity Tools, solidaritytools.com (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Filling in a template is not publishing
This matters and it is often misunderstood. If you fill in one of our agreements, checklists or tables for your own group, that is use, not publication. Your completed agreement, your minutes, your members' names and your rent figures are yours, and they are private. You have nothing to publish and nothing to share — not now, not ever.
The share-alike condition only applies when you put a changed version in front of other people — a rewritten page, a republished pack, a template built on ours and shared onward. Ordinary use of a tool carries no obligation at all beyond the credit line, and even that is only needed when you pass the material itself on.
Why share-alike, and why free
Permissive licences let anyone take a free thing and build a paid wall around it. A tenant group's letters, revised and packaged and sold back to tenants, is not a hypothetical — it is the ordinary way this goes. Share-alike removes the incentive: the moment somebody improves this and shares it, the improvement belongs to everybody again, under the same terms.
The material is free in the first place because a group that has not started has no money, and a group facing eviction should not be paying a subscription to organise. So nothing here is ever sold, and nothing here is ever gated — see the front page for the promise and the commons licences explainer if you are choosing a licence for your own work.
What we ask, which is not a condition
- Pass it on to another group. That is the entire distribution plan.
- Send corrections. If a figure is wrong for your country, or a step is missing, say so and it gets fixed: [email protected].
- Translate it. Nothing here is useful in one language only, and translated versions are welcome on this site, credited to the translator.
This page is a summary, not the licence. The licence texts linked above are the licence. Where this page and the licence text differ, the licence text wins.
A machine-readable copy is available at /licence.txt, and every page on this site declares its licence in the page header, so automated tools and search engines can find it.