Licensing
Our bylaws commit us to keeping core educational materials freely and publicly available. These are the licenses that make that commitment real. They are chosen so that learners, teachers, nonprofits and companies training their own staff never have to ask us for permission.
The short version. Articles and tutorials are CC BY-NC 4.0, plus our Additional Permission for Internal Training. Code is Apache 2.0. You may use, change and share the articles for any noncommercial purpose, and any organization may use them to train its own employees and contractors. Selling them, or using them in paid training, needs our written permission. The code you may use for anything, including commercially. All of it asks you to keep the credit attached, and none of it gives you our name or logo.
What is licensed how
| What | License | In plain terms |
|---|---|---|
| Educational articles, tutorials, how-to guides, course notes, slides, diagrams | CC BY-NC 4.0 with our Additional Permission for Internal Training | Use it, change it and share it for noncommercial purposes. Train your own employees and contractors with it. Do not sell it. Credit us. |
| Code: Terraform modules, applications, scripts, example infrastructure | Apache 2.0 | Use it for anything, including commercially, with an explicit patent promise. Keep the notices. |
Two licenses rather than one because they are built for different things. Creative Commons licenses are written for writing and images. Apache 2.0 is written for software and deals with things prose does not have, such as patents and contributions from other people.
The noncommercial condition means nobody can resell the articles or build a paid course on them without our agreement. The additional permission means that condition never stops a business from teaching its own people with them. Code has no such condition, so you can run it anywhere, including in commercial production systems.
Who can use the articles, and how
- You, learning on your own. Read, copy, print, adapt and share them.
- Teachers, schools and nonprofits can use them in free courses, study groups and workshops.
- Companies and other organizations can copy and adapt them to train their own employees and contractors, including on an internal learning platform, even though that training helps the business. That is what the additional permission adds.
- Selling them, or using them in paid training — paid courses, workshops, subscriptions, or training services sold to anyone — needs separate written permission from us. Ask us.
If you are not sure whether your use is noncommercial, the definition is in section 1(i) of the license. You are also welcome to ask.
How we apply them
Articles. Each one carries a line at the end naming CC BY-NC 4.0 and the Additional Permission for Internal Training, and linking to both. That line is what identifies an article as covered by the additional permission. If an article has no such line, treat it as covered by both unless it says otherwise.
Code. Each repository has a LICENSE file with
the full Apache 2.0 text, a NOTICE file with our copyright line,
and a two-line copyright and license header
(SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0) at the top of source
files.
When a work says something different, the work wins. If a specific article or repository states its own license, that is the one that applies to it. This page describes our default, not an override.
Crediting us
For an article, something like this is enough:
"Title of the article" by Automate the Cloud Inc., licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 with the Additional Permission for Internal Training from Automate the Cloud Inc. License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Permission: https://automatethe.cloud/licenses/atc-internal-training-permission.txt Original at https://automatethe.cloud/... Changes were made.
Drop the last line if you did not change anything. If you are using an
article to train employees or contractors under the additional permission, also
keep a copy of
the permission
notice with it — the notice itself, not just the link. For code, keep
the LICENSE and NOTICE files that came with it; that
is the credit.
What the licenses do not give you
None of these terms gives you rights to the name Automate the Cloud or the cloud mark. CC BY-NC 4.0 says so in section 2(b)(2); Apache 2.0 says so in section 6; the additional permission says not to imply that we endorse, sponsor or certify you. You may use our name to say accurately where something came from. You may not use it in a way that suggests we endorse or produced your version. See our Terms of Use.
None of them is a promise that the work is correct, safe, or fit for your situation. Both licenses disclaim warranties. Infrastructure code especially: read it before you run it.
The full text of each
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, with our Additional Permission for Internal Training — plain-English walkthrough of both, and the complete text of each.
- Apache License 2.0 — plain-English walkthrough and the complete license.
Both pages carry the official texts word for word: the licenses as published by creativecommons.org and apache.org, and the additional permission exactly as we issue it. The plain-English parts are our summary and are not the license. Where the two seem to disagree, the official text is the one that counts.