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tait.tech/licenses/index.md

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Licenses

I agree with free-culture licenses; I am a hippie at heart. I license all the content on my site under the CC-BY-SA.

Other Licenses

GPL

The GPL is the only license which guarantees code openness. It allows people to redistribute and modify your code with no restrictions except that they must also share all changes back to the original author.

MIT/BSD/Apache/Mozilla/etc.

The MIT and BSD licenses are more considered more "permissive" in that they allow closed source derivatives of the code to exist. Part of me wants to like this more: more freedom right? Sure, I suppose, but not freedom for users: the vast majority of the time this is freedom only for corporations. I'm sure this occasionally helps a small business, but I see the MIT and BSD licenses as mostly a way to get big corporations free software that they can then sell for a profit. To be clear, you can do this under the GPL as well, but at least with the GPL and changes made by a corporation making money from the software get shared back with the author and makes the software better for everyone.

CC-based licenses

Creative Commons (CC) based licenses are more for artistic works (like blog articles and information) and apply very rarely to programs. CC licenses may have a combination of a few different restrictions, or no restrictions (also known as the CC0 or Public Domain license).

The restrictions are as follows:

  • BY--the original author must be credited.
  • SA (Share-alike)--all derivative works must share the same license.
  • NC (Non-commercial)--the material may not be used for profit.
  • ND (No derivatives)--the material may only be used as is; you may not edit the materials and redistribute them.

I considered giving this site a CC-based license but ultimately decided against it; you never know who is going to just take it and then credit you in tiny invisible letters at the bottom of the page. So to avoid that whole fiasco, I use the final license:

Copyright

Full copyright means no derivatives or redistributions may be made in any way, shape or form. I use this on my own pages to protect myself, but I'd be happy to let someone use it no problem if they just ask. It gives me a bit more control over where my content ends up.