wardley-maps.sgit.ai / Licensing
CC BY inside a CC BY-SA ecosystem
This site has a licensing problem the other sites in this network do not have, and it shapes real editorial choices rather than sitting in a footer. Saying so plainly is cheaper than hoping nobody notices.
This site publishes CC BY 4.0. The Wardley ecosystem publishes CC BY-SA 4.0. Those are compatible for reading and incompatible for adapting. ShareAlike is viral: quote CC BY-SA material with attribution and nothing happens; adapt it — rewrite, restructure, translate, build a derivative table from it — and the resulting page must itself be CC BY-SA 4.0. You cannot relicense someone else's adaptation as CC BY.
The rule this site follows
Where a page genuinely wants to adapt — a rewritten doctrine list, a restructured climatic-patterns table — the right move is a clearly-marked page carrying its own CC BY-SA 4.0 notice, saying why at the top. One or two such pages are fine. A site with a mixed and unlabelled licence is not. This site currently has none, and if that changes it will be listed here.
Watch the 3.0 / 4.0 split
The standard attribution string used across the ecosystem, and used here:
Wardley Mapping is provided courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Every resource page carries a per-resource attribution string rather than a generic one, and the screenshot targets file carries the same strings attached to the capture targets — so a screenshot and its credit line cannot drift apart.
What this site's own content is
Everything written for wardley-maps.sgit.ai — every page, /documents/, /briefs/, /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, the admin surfaces, and the four maps — is CC BY 4.0, consistent with the rest of the network. Every raw markdown document carries the stamp, and the release gate fails the build if one does not, so the stamp cannot quietly drift.
The four maps are original works drawn from this site's own research. They carry no ShareAlike obligation. The technique they use is Wardley's and is credited as such — crediting a technique is courtesy and good practice, not a licence condition, and it is worth being precise about the difference rather than implying an obligation that does not exist.
Four regimes across the resources
| Regime | Examples | What you may do |
|---|---|---|
| CC0 | awesome-wardley-maps | Anything. No attribution required. The best base for your own list — and the resource this site benefits from most while correcting. |
| CC BY-SA 4.0 | The book, all compiled editions, Learn Wardley Mapping's free reference, the Mapping Canvas, wardleymaps.com, Wikipedia | Quote and screenshot with attribution. Adapt only if you accept CC BY-SA on that page. |
| CC BY-SA 3.0 ⚠️ | blog.gardeviance.org | Not 4.0. Separate notice; do not merge. |
| MIT / AGPL | OWM, Mermaid, wardleyToGo, cli-owm, ArcKit (MIT) · the Obsidian plugin and Tranquil's Map (AGPL-3.0) | Retain the notice. AGPL's network clause matters if you ever embed one in a service. |
| All rights reserved | LWM's paid course, InfoQ, YouTube, GCATI, the compiled Leanpub book, The Value Flywheel Effect, Xebia | Brief quotation and a page screenshot for identification. No re-hosting, no clipping, no reproducing their diagrams. |
Six flagged — link only until resolved
- swardley/WARDLEY-MAP-REPOSITORY — the README says CC BY-SA, the GitHub licence field says GPL-3.0. Contradictory. Do not mirror. 147 maps are worth one email; N4.
- WardleyPedia — no licence stated. Do not assume the MediaWiki default.
- Matt Edgar's critique — no statement, assume all rights reserved. The highest-value critique in the list with the least clear rights. Quoted briefly, linked out.
- Open Security Summit session pages — no licence stated, and that includes Dinis Cruz's own sessions.
- Miro / Figma / draw.io templates — mostly unstated and varying. Assume nothing; check per template.
- Discord and forum content — personal messages. Never quote a member without consent, regardless of technical accessibility.
Screenshot ethics
- A page screenshot for identification is defensible almost everywhere, including all-rights-reserved material — it is how a directory works. Clipping content out of a page is not. No Xebia diagrams, no InfoQ video frames, no GCATI syllabus.
- The attribution string travels with the image, rendered under it rather than in a global footer.
- The capture record is published — status, title, final URL, timestamp, for successes and failures alike. captured.json. Three captures returned a Cloudflare interstitial rather than the page; those are recorded as blocked and none is published as a screenshot of anything.
Third-party names — where the line is
Fine: naming a technique, a framework, a standard or a tool. Naming Simon Wardley, Ben Mosior, Chris Daniel, Matt Edgar, Danny Buerkli, Damon Skelhorn, Tristan Slominski and the other practitioners in the resource index — they are public authors of public work, credited for it.
Fine: saying MapKeep shut down on 30 May 2026 and crediting Tristan Slominski for building it. That is a factual, sourced obituary and the community needs it recorded.
Not fine: attaching maturity or capability judgements to named commercial competitors, reproducing a vendor cost-scoring table, or naming a private individual as a commercial target.
Never: quoting Discord or forum members without consent.
What is deliberately not published
The corpus this site draws on contains material that is not going to appear here, and the categories are worth stating so the omissions do not read as oversights. Each names commercial terms, a competitor, a customer, or a private individual:
- Investor-grade commercial material — pricing, customer counts, burn, TAM, a named-competitor price table, founder CV, pitch decks. None of it is needed for a mapping site.
- A third party's private investment catalogue, and internal velocity metrics.
- A consulting commercial model — contract structure, rates, a response-time price ladder. The Wardley content inside it — the explorer-to-villager handover and the Wardley citation — is publishable and appears on the PST page. The commercial model is not.
- One competitive-landscape map that attaches maturity judgements to living named companies. The other seven maps in the same brief are fine and are used.
- A research brief naming a private individual as a commercial target, and a vendor-by-vendor cost and disposition scoring table. The idea of a vendor evolution view is publishable; the scored table is not.
- Pentest material.
One item is published with care rather than withheld: the somebody has to be the villagers argument about non-functional requirements is strong and belongs here, but its market statistics are loosely attributed — the brief itself flags that "much of what circulates is vendor commentary recycling a smaller set of underlying studies" — so the argument is used and the numbers are not.