iFixit's gone all goodwill-to-all-men with the news that it's licensing all iFixit repair manuals under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

Thought to be the largest free release of repair documentation ever, iFixit says: "We are committing to make our repair manuals available to everyone in the world, forever, for free".

Created after thousands of hours documenting how to repair Apple hardware, the manuals start way back in 2004 with a repair guide for the PowerBook G3 series, and now numbers 91 Mac manuals, 34 for iPods, and a couple for iPhones.

Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons says: "iFixit is one of the most important community-driven technology resources on the net. It is wonderful to now see them build their community by giving back to the community what the community helped build".

iFixit says it's made the move because it "must" - "because the world cannot continue wantonly manufacturing and consuming devices without a plan for their long-term lifecycle. Because individuals need the ability to take control of their devices and their environmental footprint. And because it's the right thing to do".

iFixit says it hopes to host the data archive at the Internet Archive as well as seed it via BitTorrent. There's more info in a company blog post for those that want to find out more.