Documentation copyrights on Appropedia

Documentation licenses Hardware licenses Software licenses

This page describes how Appropedia handles copyright licensing.

Unless where otherwise noted, all material on Appropedia is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 (CC-BY-SA-4.0) license. This license allow free access to its content so that anyone can copy, modify, and redistribute Appropedia’s content as long as they provide the same terms to others and credit the authors of the original Appropedia article. This allows you to use all content for things such as:

• Making digital copies of Appropedia pages (including full copies)
• Translating pages to share with a new audience
• Printing pages and distributing them as you wish
• Creating an updated version of a page
• Hosting a complete course on Moodle for a class or training program

Why should you ShareAlike[edit | edit source]

ShareAlike Creative Commons licenses are defined as copyleft, which means that any type of copy or derivative must remain free and can be used by anyone, with the restriction of preserving its freedom. So, if you use Appropedia’s content, make sure you follow the rules to keep it free and available to others. Some Appropedians prefer other licenses such as GPLv3 which is compatible with our license.

Other non-copyleft licenses such as CC0 are also available and accepted. However, we strive to maintain all work available and accessible to everyone, forever, so we encourage you to use the licenses we recommend.

Are commercial uses allowed?[edit | edit source]

Please note that non-commercial licenses are heavily discouraged for the following reasons:

• The definition of non-commercial is not always clear in many jurisdictions, which may create misunderstandings.
• These licenses may discourage sustainable business models, a practice supported by Appropedia.

Proprietary licenses[edit | edit source]

Our priority is to make knowledge on sustainability and development available to everyone. For this reason, we have allowed for copyrighted materials to be distributed as open access in the past. However, this is not the norm. Any copyrighted content on Appropedia will be deleted unless its use has been reviewed and approved by Appropedia's board of directors.

Before submitting any piece of licensed materials, consider the following:

• Contact the authors or copyright holders and request them to release the materials with an open license.
• Search for alternative sources of the subject at hand.
• Help create new open source materials on this subject.

Embedded or linked content[edit | edit source]

Due to its scope of action, Appropedia is part of a larger open ecosystem of tools and platforms that host text and documents, videos, machine designs, manufacturing files, and software, among many others. Embedded videos and text from external sources, which are displayed in the online wiki but not in offline forms, are not covered by Appropedia's copyright notice, but are subject to the permissions given or license used by the respective copyright holder.

We allow links to external materials, especially those not created by the authors, but we advise you to keep these things in mind:

• You can host video and audio on Appropedia. You can also host content on Wikimedia Commons and use locally on Appropedia, which may be useful to safeguard a collection. We encourage the use of archiving platforms like Internet Archive.
• It's important to review the licenses of content you share on other platforms. For example, all videos uploaded to Youtube by default use a proprietary license that only allows certain freedoms within YouTube. For this reason, we encourage to either change your license on these services or to share on Appropedia directly.
• Content hosting platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox are disallowed because access is automatically revoked, which results in broken links.
• Keeping materials in multiple platforms will ensure that it will be viewed by more people and will last longer. That applies to Appropedia as well, which is why our content can be downloaded by you or anyone anytime.