Skip to the sheets
The readingA sheet every week

Kept for readers

The License Binder

Notes on the licenses that share code, read clause by clause

A sheet every week

Write to the Binder

Corrections, sources and suggested readings are welcome. The binder is a reading of public texts, and the public record is how it stays honest.

The binder is a reading of public texts, and it stays honest because readers correct it. If a sheet here gets a date wrong, misreads a clause, or misses a document that belongs on the record, the correction is welcome.

What to send

The most useful letters are the ones that point at a text: a license version the binder has not covered, a historical document that should be in the record, a clause whose drafting history is better documented elsewhere. Sources are what the record runs on.

What not to expect

This is a reader's publication, not a law office and not the original Collaborative Source Initiative. The binder cannot give legal advice, cannot license anything, and cannot put you in touch with the people who ran the original site. It can read a text with you.

Where the record lives

The binder is a static record, not a mailbox. The texts it reads are the public ones, archived at the Wayback Machine and in the license repositories, and the corrections that matter are the ones a reader can check against those same sources. The sheets are kept under version control alongside the site, and the record of what changed is part of the record itself.

Accepted and agreed