WikiDeal's entire software stack is published under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL v3), and all textual content — including this wiki, contract templates, research reports, and governance documents — is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA). These are not mere gestures toward openness; they are structural guarantees that the platform cannot be privatised through code or content appropriation.

Why AGPL v3?

The AGPL v3 was chosen specifically because it closes the "SaaS loophole" in the standard GPL. Under GPL, a company could take WikiDeal's code, deploy it as a service, make proprietary modifications, and never share those modifications — because they never "distribute" the software. The AGPL requires that anyone who runs a modified version as a network service must publish their modifications under the same license. This means WikiDeal's code ecosystem grows with every deployment, and no single operator can create a private fork that extracts value without contributing back.

The choice of AGPL reflects WikiDeal's understanding of how software value is created in the 21st century: not through distribution of binaries, but through operation of services. The AGPL ensures that the commons grows with every use of the commons.

CC BY-SA for Content and Contracts

All WikiDeal contract templates, wiki articles, financial model documentation, and research outputs are published under CC BY-SA 4.0. This means anyone can use, adapt, and build upon this material, provided they attribute the source and publish their adaptations under the same terms. A babysitting cooperative in Tokyo can take WikiDeal's contract templates and adapt them to Japanese law — and their adaptations are automatically available to the global WikiDeal community.

The ShareAlike requirement is the key ingredient: it creates a cumulative commons where every improvement is shared. Over time, WikiDeal's legal and documentation Infrastructure becomes a global resource for cooperative commerce — a kind of legal equivalent of the free software commons that has powered the internet's Infrastructure for three decades.

Attribution requirements are deliberately light: citing "WikiDeal / Ynternet.org Foundation" suffices. WikiDeal does not require commercial operators to "promote" it — only to acknowledge the source and continue the sharing tradition. This is consistent with the wiki culture that inspired the project: Wikipedia does not demand promotional credit, only attribution and sharing.