Is Wardley Mapping free?

Yes, Wardley Mapping is free—Simon Wardley gifted it to the world under a Creative Commons license. You don’t need to pay for access, and his book and writings are openly available.

But here’s the fine print:

• Creative Commons covers the writings, not the ideas. The concepts themselves can’t be copyrighted. So while Simon’s text is free to share and remix under the license, the ideas of mapping may live in the public domain (or not, ask your lawyer).
• No single authority defines mapping. There isn’t a fixed, canonical definition of what Wardley Mapping “is.” The practice is community-driven and constantly evolving (albeit Simon is as close to being a benevolent dictator as possible)
• It borrows from others. Wardley Mapping openly references third-party knowledge—like economic cycles, military strategy, and organizational theory—so parts of the framework maybe under different licences.

In short: it’s free, but also open-ended, collaborative, and stitched together from multiple intellectual traditions.