CC BY-SA 4.0
The licence the shared writing travels under: copy it, change it, even sell it — say where it came from, and pass on the same freedom.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike is the public permission that rides along with a work so that nobody has to ask. Anyone may use it, adapt it, and build on it. Two things are asked in return. BY, attribution: say where it came from, in the words the licence asks for. SA, share-alike: your version carries the same licence, so what is given freely stays free downstream.
Share-alike is the half that does the structural work. Without it, a commons can be improved once and then enclosed — each successive version a little less available than the last, until the descendants of a gift are behind a wall. With it, the gift propagates: every improvement anyone makes returns to the same commons the original came from. It is the licensing expression of the same instinct that puts an asset lock in the legal form and a purpose lock above it.
A licence once given stays given. A maker may stop offering a work, and whoever already has it keeps what they were given. Authors remain authors: the licence grants use, not ownership, and you keep your rights in what you wrote.
The seed text and the shared writing of this body are offered under this licence, and it is the licence the Little Book states for itself. Software is licensed separately, permissively, because code and prose fail differently.
Also called: share-alike, Creative Commons, CC BY-SA Stands on: License · Knowledge as commons · Commons Opens onto: Attribution · MIT · Provenance · Constitutional Protection Of Purpose · The asset lock In play: Room · beyond Sources: the Player+ Modules' Lexicon and Gratitude, Lineage and Licensing (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, licence line (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · lionsberg.wiki: The Little Book of the Great Game Open: the canon as a whole has no single stated licence; the Little Book states one for itself, and the seed text follows it. What licence covers the wiki's older pages has not been settled.