The licence
It belongs to everyone.
A manifesto that somebody owns is not a manifesto, it is an advertisement. So this one is not ours: it is published under a Creative Commons licence, and that is not a gesture — it is a legal fact you can rely on.
CC BY-SA 4.0Take it and do what you want with it. Name where it came from, and leave what you build just as free as you found it. That is the whole deal.
What you can do
- Copy it, all of itThe ten rules, the city rules, the texts, the badge design, the code of this site.
- Translate it into your languageAnd publish the translation as yours. No permission needed, no email to send.
- Print it and hang itBehind your counter, in a hundred shops, on a wall in a city we have never heard of.
- Make money with itPosters, stickers, a book, a course, a coffee bag. Commercial use is included and always will be.
- Change it and disagree with itRewrite a rule, drop one, add five. A fork of this manifesto is a compliment, not a theft.
What you owe in return
- Say where it came fromName rules.coffee and the licence. A line at the bottom is enough — and if you changed something, say that you changed it.
- Keep it as free as you found itWhatever you build on it goes out under the same licence, CC BY-SA 4.0. You may sell it; you may not lock it.
What nobody can do
- Close it back upYou cannot add restrictions we did not add: no copyright claim over the manifesto, no technical lock that stops others doing what this licence allows. Once free, always free.
The rules you propose
When you propose a rule for a city and it gets approved, it is published under the same licence as everything else: CC BY-SA 4.0. You are giving it to the commons, and that is the point — but you are not giving up your name. Whether it stays visible is a separate matter: each city keeps only the ten most voted rules, so your rule lives or waits below the line according to the votes, never according to us.
If you chose a public name when you signed in, it appears under your rule and travels with it: anyone reusing that rule owes you the same credit they owe rules.coffee. If you left it empty, you stay anonymous and the rule is simply the community's.
Your email address is never shown to anyone, never sold, never used for a newsletter. It exists so that a vote means one person.
And the sign on your door
The badge design is under the same licence: print it, reprint it, have a sign maker copy it in enamel. The name of your bar on it is yours, not ours — we never claim anything over it.
And it stays what it always was: a promise you made in public, not a certificate anybody sold you. Nobody can charge you for the right to display it, including us.
This page is the plain-language version and it is not the licence itself. The text that counts is the full legal code of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International; the summary on the Creative Commons site sits between the two. Where this page and the licence disagree, the licence wins.
Back to the ten rules