Sources & Licences
Our field guides (The Field Manual, the kit guides and The 72-Hour Atlas) are our own work, © 2026 SOS.city. Every method in them is cited where it appears, and each guide lists its sources at the end.
The Grid-Down Kit also includes open content and software made by others. It is shared under open licences that allow it to be included in a product you pay for, on the condition that its makers are credited and you remain free to copy it. You are. Every drive and every library build includes a READ-ME-LICENSES.html file and a LICENSES folder listing each file, its maker, its licence and where it came from.
What’s in the offline library, and its licence
| Content | Made by | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia (English, with images), Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiversity | Wikipedia and Wikimedia contributors; offline files by Kiwix/openZIM | CC BY-SA 4.0 (images keep their own licences) |
| WikiMed, MDWiki, WikEM | Their contributors | CC BY-SA |
| Expert Q&A: home improvement, gardening, cooking, cars, bicycles, the outdoors, amateur radio, sustainable living, medical sciences, electronics, physics, chemistry, woodworking and more | Stack Exchange contributors (each answer links to its author) | CC BY-SA 2.5 / 3.0 / 4.0 by date |
| Appropedia, energypedia | Their contributors | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| PhET science simulations | PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder | CC BY 4.0 |
| US Army field manuals (public release), FEMA Are You Ready? and CERT manual, Ready.gov, CDC, EPA and USDA guidance, the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning | US government agencies | Public domain (US government works), distributed unmodified |
| Nuclear War Survival Skills | Cresson H. Kearny; Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine edition | Free to reproduce in full with its notice |
| Offline maps and map data | © OpenStreetMap contributors | Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 |
| US Topo maps, elevation and water data (Core Drive) | U.S. Geological Survey | Public domain |
| Kiwix reader apps and kiwix-serve, with their source code | Kiwix | GNU GPL v3 |
| Qwen3.5 AI models | Alibaba Cloud (Qwen team) | Apache 2.0 |
| llama.cpp | The ggml / llama.cpp authors | MIT |
| The Grid-Down app | The Grid-Down contributors | Code Apache 2.0, text CC BY 4.0 |
What we leave out, and why
Some popular offline collections are licensed for non-commercial use only, or don’t allow redistribution. We don’t include them in anything we sell: Khan Academy, TED talks, wikiHow, iFixit, LibreTexts, Hesperian’s health books and others. Some competing “survival drives” bundle them anyway; we think you should know the difference. Where a book is worth owning, we tell you to buy it.
No endorsement
SOS.city is independent. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Kiwix, the Wikimedia Foundation, Stack Exchange, OpenStreetMap, PhET, the US Army, FEMA, the CDC, USGS, Alibaba Cloud or any other source named here. Names are used only to describe what’s included.
Source code
The GPL-licensed apps on our drives ship with their complete source code in the 04-apps/source folder. If anything is missing, contact us and we’ll send it, for at least three years after we ship your drive.