2013-02-16 Licenses, Copyright and all that stuff. I think about it these days, both, in general and personally. Which License do I prefer -- for source code, for texts and for non-text media -- and why? I used to prefer the MIT/X11 License for source code because it is widespread, simple and does what I want. Concerning texts I used no specific license but motivated people to copy and distri- bute the documents in unchanged form. I saw few sense in alter- ing documents (apart from technical documentation). IMO quoting and referencing is enough. I have not created a relevant amount of non-text media to care about it. Should I reconsider my view on the topic? Is there sense in releasing texts, for instance this one, unter CC-BY? Is there sense in putting it into the public domain, or something equivalent? Is it necessary to explicitely allow copy- ing as digital information can always be linked? I wonder if it would make sense to release all of my output as CC0 (i.e. public domain). If someone values my work, he'll men- tion me appropriately (and would not need to fear some forgotten reference). If someone want's to misuse my work, licenses will hardly keep him from doing so. I want to give my work to the world but care hardly what they do with it. Every now and then, I ask myself if Stallman's approach with Copyleft is the right way to go. Each time I come back to simple, permissive licenses eventually. I just don't want to fight. I want to give my stuff to others and build upon theirs. This is how it should be. The only question is: How do I save me from suffering from negative consequences? Again: If someone wants to harm me, he'll find a way. Hence -- assuming I am an optimist -- I could release all my work as CC0 (public domain) and thus make it most simple for others to do with it whatever they want. I would simply not care if that makes sense for a text that describes my personal option- ion or not. This could be a way to go. The choice for source code is simpler. Either I keep using the MIT/X11 License, which I like a lot or I start using CC0. Neither option is bad. I just don't care much. Besides, I believe that most of the code I publish is below the threshold of originality (Schoepfungshoehe) thus no usage restrictions exist. The difficult type are texts of different sizes and qualities. I'm still not sure how to handle them. Worse: I don't know how to get closer to a good decision. [I've put this text there [0] as well.] This text was partly motivated by a discussion in debianforum.de [1] and the bugroff License [2] posted by Lohengrin there. It was also motivated by discussions on Open Access and reasons for using CC-BY for text publications, elsewhere. [0] http://marmaro.de/rem/texte/on-licenses [1] http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=140921 [2] http://tunes.org/legalese/bugroff.html http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke