At the Green Web Foundation, we publish as much of our output as possible under open licenses. For software projects we use permissive software licenses that allow you to build or extend your own software using them.
For our narrative output like reports and magazines we use the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). This means you can use the content, even commercially, as long as you provide attribution.
For data we publish, we use the permissive Open Database License, that offers similar rights around usage – see the below for more details.
Finally, almost everything else, like our website content, is published under the same Creative Commons Attribution License as our reports and magazines.
If you are in doubt about the licensing for any of our other output, or you’d like to license it under other terms required by your organisation, please drop us a line, we’re happy to talk you through your options.
Why use these licenses?
We use these licenses because as a small non profit organisation, “open” as a concept allows our work to travel further and influence more people. It allows our code to be put in front of 100 million people every day via an open source web browser. It allows the insights from our fellowships programme to influence people beyond our direct contacts, and it allows the open educational material we publish to inform and influence decisions, without us needing to take part in those decisions.
The internet should a global and common public good, and we believe in contributing to a digital commons that current and future generations can use to work towards more just and sustainable internet.
You are free to use our work as we outline above, and while not every license we publish under requires it, we ask that you share attribution if use what we create. This helps us raise the funding to continue the work we do.
How to CITE our work
If you are using our tools and data, please attribute your use to the Green Web Foundation, linking back to our website. Please see the specific guidelines in our respective publicationsm, like Branch, or our report for further detail on citing them in your own work.
You are free to use our logos and brand assets in your attribution, where we share guidance on correct usage.
We don’t put tracking code in the software we publish, and in almost all cases you can access our work without needing to share contact details first. While this respects your privacy, it makes it harder to know how our work is being used.
So, if you find it useful enough to include in your own projects, please do let us know.
How else to support us
You can contribute code or request features on Github. We are active on social media (mostly LinkedIn) and sharing our content there helps us there too.
If you use any of our output in your own work, please consider creating a case study with us.
You can also support us financially donations. Follow the link below for more.
Further details on our licensing
Code
We default to the Apache 2.0 license in all new code projects but some older projects may be licensed under the similarly permissive MIT licence, like our Web Browser Extension.
Where there is a convention within an open source community, we try to follow it – so for the WordPress code we use, like the WordPress theme used on our website and plugins – we use the General Public License v2 (GPL2).
When in doubt, please see either see our tool listing page for more, or each individual project’s LICENSE file.
Data
The Green Web Dataset is made available under the Open Database License. This means that you are free to:
- Share: Copy, distribute and use the database.
- Create: Produce works from the database.
- Adapt: Modify, transform and build upon the database.
As long as you:
- Attribute: You must attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database, in the manner specified in the ODbL. For any use or redistribution of the database, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the license of the database and keep intact any notices on the original database.
- Share-Alike: If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.
- Keep open: If you redistribute the database, or an adapted version of it, then you may use technological measures that restrict the work (such as DRM) as long as you also redistribute a version without such measures.