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Licensing foo

2013-03-05

Some things are going very wrong right now in Germany. One of these things is the so called “Leistungsschutzrecht” – a sweet example of a typical german compound word. There has been a lot of protest and public dispute. I won’t go into details because they don’t really matter for this blog post. The “Leistungsschutzrecht” simply set me off, annoyed me and made me re-think licensing once more.

I’m tired of this. Thus, all content of this blog is hereby plubished as PIZZA-WARE:

PIZZA-WARE

It all boils down to this: “Please give credits to the original author. Aside from that, do whatever you wish. The pizza is optional.”

It’s really tiresome to constantly worry about licenses. I don’t want to do that anymore. When I come across something interesting, I want to do with it whatever I want to. Quote text, work with pictures or music, hack on code, and so on. When something is worth it, I “thank” the author – be it payment or whatever. This usually works just fine. All the free stuff out there enhances my life and it also makes my life easier.

It’s only logical to publish my own stuff in a similar way. Please, take it, use it, enjoy it. You should be able to use it just as freely as I want to be able to use your stuff. As far as I can understand, a license like PIZZA-WARE is about the “most free” way to publish something (according to german law). And I think it’s very clear to the users that PIZZA-WARE allows pretty much everything. If there’s something that’s even easier or even more free, just tell me.

I like copyleft, but it’s gotten too complicated. There’s too many versions of it. Some licenses work together, others don’t. Worse, when you’re working for a large company, you’re sometimes forbidden to use copylefted software (that happened to me once). Of course, as a result, you either have to implement it yourself or you have to use another product which, maybe, is not as good. Both options are bad.

I don’t need to make money with my code or pictures or whatever. I have a paid job to make money. All that I publish is done in my free time – because I want to. There’s no reason to make money with it. On the contrary, I feel like I have an obligation to publish it as free software because I use so much free software made by other authors.

Comments?