Since Creative Commons updated their portfolio of licenses to version 4, I decided to revisit the license for this site and update my own license.

I used this handy "choose a license" page, though I kept the same license I had before -- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International-- just updating it from version 3 to 4.

As you can see from the image above, generated from my license-choosing preferences, the CC site tells my that the license I chose is not a "free culture license," because I'm not allowing unrestricted use of my work in commercial settings.

I'm not saying I won't revisit the issue in future, and there are plenty of things I am comfortable releasing for unmitigated commercial use by others. But on the whole, I'm sticking with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Rob and I have been talking about licensing a bit over the past month or so, and I'm listening to a lot of discussion and debate about software freedom and licensing courtesy of the Free as in Freedom podcast.

So I decided to license the content of this blog. It's possible to use a software license like the GPL for written, "creative" content, just as it's possible to use a license like those from Creative Commons, which were written with "creative" works in mind, for software.

But since what's here is, for lack of a better word, prose, I am choosing a Creative Commons license: the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license, the full text of which you can read here.

It means you can use what you see here for non-commercial purposes if you attribute it and share it under the same (or a like-minded) license.

If you do want to use what you see here in a commercial (read: moneymaking) setting, contact me at steven (at) stevenrosenberg (dot) net. We can probably work something out.

What licensing is (and isn't): A lack of a license on your code or content -- seemingly giving no rights -- doesn't "protect" it more than having an actual license. Nor will a license in and of itself keep others from doing things with your content that are in violation of the license.

As Bradley Kuhn often says on Free as in Freedom, sometimes enforcement is required. If you find somebody violating terms of the license under which you have made your work available, you might have to get out there and do some enforcement. The license gives you a legal framework under which to do that enforcement.