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Why are there licenses on everything?
Mostly so people in Europe “have my permission” to see my stuff on Google. Europe passed some bullcrap called Article 13, which is basically censorship by default for anything posted online without a license. Having to add licenses feels icky and lawyer-y to me. My projects are just graffiti on the internet and it feels like I just stapled a contract on top of them. It’s weird. I mean, I kinda get it. Theoretically, it might be good to be super-duper-ultra-deluxe clear about how you prefer people to use your work. But a license makes me feel like I’m lording control over scribbles I doodled in a school notebook. It’s overkill for most things in life. I mean what if I, you know… don’t care?? Welp, “Public Domain” is kinda the legal way of saying “who cares!?” and giving up all ownership.
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… Okay, I do wanna at least sign my stuff so people know where it comes from, so I picked a “Creative Commons” license for everything. (Yes everything, even the website itself. Go ahead and copy it to show off your stuff) There’s a bunch of licenses out there but I picked one that’s about as free-ballin’ as I can go without straight-up erasing my name from all my sketches. Here’s a good website if you want pick an easy one without hurting your brain.
… or you could use the Against DRM license. I kind of like that one.
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Want details? Didn’t think so, but here you go anyway. This is the license I ususally use for most stuff on here: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
(WTF?? I’m pretty sure that “sentence” is making a grammar teacher cry somewhere)
… and here’s what it means:
- Creative Commons
- My stuff pretty much belongs to everybody. You can use it, mangle it, share it, I don’t care. ☮
- Attribution
- Don’t erase my name from the original version and call it yours. But by all means, take some credit if you make a Meme out of it.
- NonCommercial
- Don’t sell it… It’s not like I’m selling this stuff so that wouldn’t be fair to anybody.
- Source code?
- … Don’t care, just use it and share it like everything else. I might include it, but I’m usually too lazy.
- Patents?
- Whatever that is, I don’t have one, and I don’t care.
# This is basically an MIT license, but I think this spells things out more clearly, which is kinda the whole point.