Hi all,
I think it would be a good idea for everyone to think about what you want others to be able to do with your work. Copyright works such that if you don't give any kind of statement what others may or may not do with your work, they basically may do nothing with your work, but what is considered "fair use", which is about limited to quoting.
So, if you want others to be able to do more than that, you have to say so one way or another. So, if you want your work to be "open source", you have to say so, and you have to say what you mean by that.
Now I understand you don't feel any desire to dig into the laws and waste a lot of time into writing a "licence" in order to express what you want to allow.
However, over at Creative Commons they have a couple of standard licenses you could consider using:
Licenses - Creative Commons
This might become very important, if for example, for one reason or another, Aaron would be forced to pull the plug from this website.
So, for example, if you would like to only allow others to redistribute your work for non-commercial purposes, all you need to do is to apply this license to your work:
Creative Commons — Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
"This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."
You can do this by simply copying this Creative Commons Legal Code tekst into your document, for example at the end, or by stating that you license your work under these conditions and refer to this link.
This brings me to the subject of backups. I regularly make a backup of this site, using the "wget" program. Now suppose this site goes down, what could I do? I would not be allowed to republish my backup, while I know most people would want the contents of the forum to survive.
So, me thinks, let's bring this up and see what you guys think...
I think it would be a good idea for everyone to think about what you want others to be able to do with your work. Copyright works such that if you don't give any kind of statement what others may or may not do with your work, they basically may do nothing with your work, but what is considered "fair use", which is about limited to quoting.
So, if you want others to be able to do more than that, you have to say so one way or another. So, if you want your work to be "open source", you have to say so, and you have to say what you mean by that.
Now I understand you don't feel any desire to dig into the laws and waste a lot of time into writing a "licence" in order to express what you want to allow.
However, over at Creative Commons they have a couple of standard licenses you could consider using:
Licenses - Creative Commons
This might become very important, if for example, for one reason or another, Aaron would be forced to pull the plug from this website.
So, for example, if you would like to only allow others to redistribute your work for non-commercial purposes, all you need to do is to apply this license to your work:
Creative Commons — Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
"This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."
You can do this by simply copying this Creative Commons Legal Code tekst into your document, for example at the end, or by stating that you license your work under these conditions and refer to this link.
This brings me to the subject of backups. I regularly make a backup of this site, using the "wget" program. Now suppose this site goes down, what could I do? I would not be allowed to republish my backup, while I know most people would want the contents of the forum to survive.
So, me thinks, let's bring this up and see what you guys think...
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