author: “Luke Rawlins”
date: “2023-09-10”
title: Adding a Creative Commons License
description: “Why I think it's important to license under creative commons.”
url: /thinking-about-licenses/
tags:
– Open Source
– Creative Commons
After attending a talk by Scott
McCarty over the weekend at the Ohio Linux Fest
I was inspired to go through my blog and make sure that I added a Creative
Commons License to all of my work.
I think it's important to let people know what they can and can't do with your
work. While at the same time help to protect a public body of knowledge and ensure that it
remains free (as in freedom).
I've decieded to license all of my work under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike agreement. Which in my completely non-lawyerish brain
means you can do pretty much anything you want with my blog posts as long as you
attribute it, and most important to me you release that work under
the same license. Allowing the people you share it with to have the ability to
continue to modify and share it forever. I can't lock it behind DRM, and neither
can anyone else.
I purposely chose a copyleft
license for a few reasons:
1. On the off chance that I ever write something of value I want people to be
able to share it. Both those who re-publish it, as well as those who
consume it.
2. From what I read on the interwebs, a good portion of the data used to train Large Language
Models, and other forms of AI is scraped from blogs like this one. If this
is the case, then I like to think that one day the AI companies will find
themselves in a copyright lawsuit, and something I wrote on this blog could bring a small victory in the battle
to make AI open source.
3. It matches up with my most valued ethical priciple – Don't be an asshole,
except to people who deserve it.
One of the points that became a common theme over the entire conference was
presented by Joe Brockmeier in his talk entitled “Open Source can't win”.
The idea being, the Free and Open Source community have started to become complacent
when it comes to defending Free and Open Source Software.
We've become comfortable with the idea that Open Source has already won,
when in reality it appears to be under attack like never before.
Everyone is of course aware of Red Hat's recent decisions surrounding CentOS, whatever your opinion on that is what I think is
even more damaging to FOSS is Hashicorp's recent license change which in my humble
opinion shows a real disdain for the entire concept of Free and Open Source
Software. You can read about it here: opentf.org.
What Hashicorp has done should terrify anyone who has ever contributed code to
an “Open Source” project, especially if you had to sign a CLA – Contributor License
Agreement. Because
now code contributed in good faith for the betterment of the project by members
of the community could suddenly become proprietary with the contributors having little or likely no recourse.
It's with all this in the back, or front, of my mind that I've gone the route of
adding the Creative Commons License to my work here. And if you host a blog I
would encourage you to do the same.
Please feel free to use my posts, change them, modify them, or whatever – But if you share them, you pass those same
rights on to whoever recieves it.