Blog Update: License Changes

TLDR; All the original content are now licensed under “Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0” and the website is now compatible with the “GNU GPLv3” copyleft license. This means you can use my content more freely.

When writing (or building) something our ideas are usually built on top of other ideas and often these ideas are based on other peoples ideas/research. And other people generally license their work mainly because they want their work to be used in a certain way. This is all fair and they have all the rights to do so, but sometimes their licensing creates this weird situation where you don’t want to “steal” their ideas/work but at the same time their licensing is not really compatible with what you are trying to do. Most of the time people just roll with it and hope that nobody notices but we all know that’s not a right thing to do (and it might even be illegal in some cases).

Since I really don’t want to deal with licensing issues myself, I decided to make some changes so my audience doesn’t have to deal with it either.

When I started this blog I decided to license my original content under the “Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0” and it made sense to me because at the time I believed that all knowledge (in any form) should be free and accessible. But I was naive and I never thought that this is just another restriction that I’m putting on my work and a headache for my audience that actually want to use my work. I may reason with myself that using my content in this or that way is not justfied but the truth is that I don’t really care how you use my content as long as you follow the licensing.

I’m choosing “Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0” mainly because it is compatible¹ with the GNU’s “GPLv3” copyleft license and it has less restrictions on the way you can use the content. This also means I can easily use the GNU GPLv3 for my code snippets and I don’t have to think about the compatibility between licenses.

Anyway that’s all I wanted to talk about in this post and I hope that these changes will be useful for those whom actually want to use my content and build upon it.