Licence

Take what you need. Put it in your repository. Change it so it fits. That is what the library is for, and none of it requires asking, paying, or making an account.

What you may do

• Read every document, in a browser or as plain text.
• Download them, one at a time or as packs.
• Copy them into your own projects — private repositories, public repositories, client work, commercial products.
• Modify and adapt them until they fit what you actually do.
• Let your agents read, fetch, index and act on them. Machine reading is expressly permitted; it is the point of the site.
• Quote them, with attribution.

A public repository that contains a document from this library is using it, not redistributing it. That stays true whether the repository is a weekend project or a product you charge for.

What's reserved

Republishing the library, or a substantial part of it, as a collection: mirrors, forks presented as libraries in their own right, catalogues assembled out of these documents.

The line is between using a document and reshipping the corpus. Dropping files into a project is using. Standing up something that competes with this site by containing its contents is not. Where that line is genuinely unclear, ask — nobody is trying to catch you out.

Why this isn't an open licence yet

Because an open licence is irreversible, and this library is four weeks old.

CC BY 4.0 cannot be withdrawn from anything published under it. Picking it on day one is not the cautious choice it looks like — it is the single decision here that can never be revisited, taken at the moment of least information. Right now there are no outside contributors, no settled norms about what gets merged and what gets declined, and no evidence about how these documents behave once they are loose in other people's repositories. Those are the facts the decision should rest on, and none of them exist yet.

So it is deferred rather than made, and written down rather than implied. The grant above is wide enough that the difference should not reach an ordinary reader at all: you may already do everything you came here to do.

What would move it: outside contributors, a clear picture of how the documents get used, and a settled answer on what happens when someone reships them. Months, not principle. The version number in Handover-1.0 is there because this file is expected to change.

If you contribute

You keep copyright. You grant permission to publish, modify and redistribute your document — the modification right matters, because sanitisation, merging corrections and superseding stale guidance all depend on it — and to license it onward under this licenceor any more permissive licence the library later adopts, CC BY 4.0 included.

That clause runs one way only. It means the library can open up later without having to find everyone who ever contributed, which is the practical difference between a deferred decision and an abandoned one. It does not allow the terms to be tightened below what your work was accepted under.

Contributing covers the rest, including what happens to a submission after it arrives.

Free, permanently

No paywall, no premium tier, no login to download anything. That is a promise aboutaccess, it is permanent, and it is written into the licence file rather than left in marketing copy.

It is not currently a promise about licensing, and saying otherwise would be the easy thing to write and the dishonest one. The two are separate, and this page keeps them separate.

Attribution

Every downloadable document carries a short header: authors and their URLs, a link back to the source page, the licence, and a date — when it was last confirmed working, or for a document that states a standard rather than reporting a result, when it was last reviewed. Packs repeat it in their MANIFEST.

Keep it. A document copied into a repository is beyond anything this site can reach, and that header is the only thing that still credits the person who wrote it. It is what contributors are paid in.

Site code, and other people's trademarks

This page covers the library — the documents. The website's source code is licensed separately, under the Business Source License 1.1.

Tool, vendor and product names in these documents belong to their owners and are used descriptively. Nothing here implies endorsement by, or affiliation with, any vendor.