Licensing
Take this. Use it, quote it, fork it into your own handbook, sell a course built on it if you like. Say where it came from. That is the whole deal, and the rest of this page is why we think it is the right one.
The licence
The content of this site is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
In plain terms, you may:
- Copy and redistribute it in any medium or format
- Adapt it (remix, transform, build on it) for any purpose, including commercially
On one condition: give appropriate credit. Name OneTotem, link back to the page you took it from, and say if you changed anything. You do not have to ask us first, you do not owe us anything, and we cannot revoke it later for material you have already used.
Why we picked it
Because it is what the site was already doing.
Everything here is published in the open on purpose. The totems, the pillars,
the hiring process, the salary logic, the parts that did not work: all of it is
the company handbook, readable by anyone, including people who will never work
here and companies that compete with us. /llms.txt actively invites models in.
The home page says: read it and decide for yourself whether we are a good match.
A site that behaves that way and says nothing about licensing is relying on everyone's good manners. CC BY does not change what we do; it makes the one thing we care about, the credit, something you can point at rather than something you hope for.
And a handbook copied with our name on it is not a loss. It is the argument travelling further than we can carry it.
What we deliberately did not do
No NonCommercial (NC). It sounds cautious and it is mostly a trap. Nobody agrees where "commercial" starts (a consultancy quoting a totem in a deck? an agency that trains its team on this?) and the people we most want copying this are other companies, which is exactly who NC blocks. A clause that stops the use you want and permits the use you never thought about is a badly aimed clause.
No ShareAlike (SA). SA would mean that quoting a totem in your own handbook obliges you to publish that handbook under the same terms. Most companies cannot do that even when they would like to, so in practice SA would tell them to just not cite us. That is the opposite of the point.
No NoDerivatives (ND). A principle you are not allowed to adapt is a principle you are supposed to obey, and totem 42 says everything here is negotiable. Publishing it under a licence that forbids editing would contradict the content it is licensing.
Not public domain (CC0) either. CC0 would drop the attribution requirement, and attribution is the only thing we are asking for. Given the whole site argues for saying where things came from, waiving it would be strange.
What the licence does not cover
Four things, and none of them is a technicality.
The legal pages. Privacy, Terms, the Generative AI policy and the Accessibility statement are statements by Red Forest S.L. about Red Forest S.L. Reusing them with attribution would mean another company publishing our privacy commitments under our name. They are all rights reserved, and if you want a starting point for your own, take the structure and write your own words, which is what you should be doing anyway.
The name and the mark. "OneTotem", "One Totem", the six-shape mark and the brand names of TakeFortyTwo, duck.email, 4dias and clione.ai are trademarks. A content licence does not license trademarks, in any jurisdiction, ever. You can quote the handbook; you cannot use the mark to suggest we endorse you.
Quoted material. Where we quote someone (Borges, Semler, whoever), the quotation belongs to them and is used here under quotation rights. Our licence cannot grant you rights we do not have.
The fonts. Bricolage Grotesque and IBM Plex are under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1, which is their licence and not ours to change.
What it does not settle
Whether AI models may train on this. It is the question we get asked and the one CC BY does not answer, so it is worth being precise rather than reassuring.
CC BY is a copyright licence. Whether training a model is an act that copyright governs at all is unsettled and being litigated in several jurisdictions at once. If it is, then training on this site under CC BY carries the same attribution condition as any other use. If it is not, the licence is simply not the instrument that applies.
What we can say is our position, and we have stated it in the only
machine-readable form that currently exists. Our robots.txt carries:
Content-Usage: train-ai=y
Content-Usage: search=y
Train on it. Answer questions with it. Put it in an index. Yes to all of it.
That is the IETF's AI-preferences vocabulary, which is a working-group draft on
the standards track rather than a finished RFC. We adopted it early on purpose:
it is the successor to every improvised noai tag, and a preference nobody
expressed is a preference nobody can honour.
And here is the part worth being honest about, because it is the only thing we
are actually asking for: that vocabulary cannot express attribution. It
defines exactly two categories, train-ai and search, and each is yes or no.
There is no field for credit. So the permission above is unconditional in the
only language the protocol speaks, and the condition (name us) lives in the
CC BY licence, which robots.txt points at in a comment, which every page
declares in rel="license", and which every page's JSON-LD graph carries as
license.
If you are building something on this, that is the whole ask. Not payment, not permission, not a conversation. Say where it came from.
Whether a court agrees with any of this. These pages have not been through legal review. That is written on them, and it is written here too.
How to credit us
Anything that identifies the source works. If you want a form to copy:
Adapted from the OneTotem handbook, CC BY 4.0.
For a single totem, link the totem. For the whole thing, link the home page. Nobody is going to audit your footnotes.
If you are not sure
Ask: hello@onetotem.com. The answer is almost certainly yes, and it will not take us long to say so.
Last updated · Red Forest S.L..