# The World Then — License

Copyright (c) 2026 Michael Manning ("The World Then", formerly "Atlas of Civilizations")

This project is a hybrid work with COMPONENT-SPECIFIC licenses. Each component
below is licensed on its own terms; nothing here is a choice between two
licenses for the same material, and the same file can hold differently
licensed parts (the built pages and data files do).

1. **The software** — the original markup, styles, and scripts of the atlas
   page (source/app.html and the pages built from it: index.html and
   the-world-then.html), the structure and styles of about.html, the build
   script (source/build.py), and the build documentation — is licensed under
   **The World Then Noncommercial ShareAlike License 1.0**, a custom license
   written for this project. Its full text ships beside this file as
   LICENSE-TWT-NC-SA-1.0.txt and at https://theworldthen.com/LICENSE-TWT-NC-SA-1.0.txt.
   It is not an open-source license and it is not a PolyForm or Creative
   Commons license. In short: noncommercial use is permitted (learning,
   research, teaching, hobby projects, freely available community tools, and
   an honestly credited personal portfolio, including when seeking work);
   anyone who distributes a modified version, or lets other people use a
   hosted one, must offer their contributions under this same license, keep
   the credits, identify their changes, and give those recipients or users
   matching source; private modifications need not be published; commercial
   use needs separate permission (see section 8 of the license).

   CORRESPONDING SOURCE: the editable source of the deployed software is
   published in the same repository that serves the site,
   https://github.com/mikeroni/theworldthen, under source/ (app.html,
   about.html, build.py, BUILDING.md). Every deployed release is tagged
   release-<number>; the About page of each build names its own release, so
   a downloaded the-world-then.html can be matched to the exact source that
   built it. Build instructions: source/BUILDING.md.

2. **The creative content** — the curated historical dataset (polity roster
   curation, religion/culture/language tags, curated wars and cities), all
   prose, the visual design, and the generative sound design — is licensed
   under **Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
   International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)**:
   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode
   The software license's conditions do not apply to this content, and this
   content's conditions do not apply to the software.

3. **Third-party material keeps its own licenses** and is NOT relicensed by
   this file: the historical border geometry is derived from the
   historical-basemaps project (A. Ourednik,
   https://github.com/aourednik/historical-basemaps) and that DATA component
   remains **GPL-3.0** (provenance corrected 2026-07-14) — the full license
   text ships as LICENSE-GPL-3.0.txt beside this file, and the same terms
   travel with the border-geometry frames inside the built data files
   (data/civs-app.json, the standalone page). These components are aggregated
   alongside this project's own work, not merged into one licensed whole: the
   noncommercial grants above apply only to what is ours, and anyone who
   extracts and redistributes the border-geometry data does so under
   GPL-3.0's terms, not these. Wikipedia text remains CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikidata
   data is CC0, AUSTLANG name data is CC BY 4.0 (AIATSIS), Natural Earth data
   is public domain, images are served from Wikimedia Commons under their
   individual licenses, and bundled libraries carry their own licenses (d3
   and topojson-client are ISC, the vendored flubber library is MIT, its
   notice preserved in the file; the Fraunces, Inter, and Cinzel typefaces
   are SIL OFL 1.1). The complete public inventory, row for row, is the
   "Sources & licenses" section of the About page:
   https://theworldthen.com/about.html#sources

4. **Historical notice (software license transition, 2026-10-16).** Through
   the public release of 2026-10-16 (commit 596f428 of the repository above,
   round (212)) the software component was offered under the PolyForm
   Noncommercial License 1.0.0 (https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0).
   The release tagged release-213 (2026-10-16) is the first published under
   The World Then Noncommercial ShareAlike License 1.0, and every later
   release and contribution is offered under it. This change is prospective:
   it does not revoke any grant already received, and software obtained under
   the PolyForm terms remains subject to those terms for that copy; the
   earlier releases and their license text stay in the repository's history.
   The new license differs from PolyForm beyond adding share-alike: it adds a
   matching-source condition for distributed and hosted modified versions, it
   expressly permits credited personal portfolios and hosted source delivery,
   and it does not carry PolyForm's blanket permitted-use rule for named
   nonprofit and public institutions (the activity decides, not the
   operator). PolyForm is not offered as an alternative for new contributions.

The About page (https://theworldthen.com/about.html#use) states the software
rules in plain words: noncommercial use; keep the credits and notices; a shared
or hosted modified version carries the same software license and offers its
source. The creative content's conditions are those of CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and
nothing more; third-party material answers only to its own terms. These terms
have not been reviewed by a lawyer. Commercial licensing and questions:
mikemanning1223@gmail.com.

Copyright notice to retain: Copyright (c) 2026 Michael Manning (The World Then)