And the freedom of information

I’m a big fan of copyleft licenses¹, in particular the permissive ones such as BSD and MIT². I believe that the right to distribute, display and build upon the work of others is a freedom that is not only beneficial for both user and original author, but for the advancement of society as a whole. This is why I released my book on LaTeX under a CC0 license, why I license my LaTeX hacks under the LPPL license, and why I license my blog and its content the way I do (which will be explained later in this article).

Companies such as Bandcamp have proved that one can make a profit from creative works of art, even if you let the end-user decide exactly how much to pay (including not at all). Some bands even release their music under fairly permissive CC licenses, and I think this is a wonderful development.

Anyway, on to the actual licensing of this blog. It’s a bit complicated.

Licensing

The following only applies to content residing on this blog, i.e. blog.sigurdhsson.org, and to its backend source located at the urdh/Sigurdhsson-blog Bitbucket repository. It does not apply to any of my other projects hosted at other locations (including those on Bitbucket), and it does not apply to content that I don’t own (although this will be clearly stated when such content is used). If parts of this blog aren’t licensed as described below, this will be clearly indicated.

In general, you can pretty much assume that backend code (unless part of a third party library) is CC0, text (blog posts, code samples and so on) is CC-By and media (images, videos and audio hosted on the blog) is CC-By-Nc-Sa. Embedded media from other sites (YouTube videos, externally hosted images and such) is under whatever license the author put it under, but this should be clearly indicated whenever this is the case.

Code

The most complicated licensing applies to the code. Since it uses third-party libraries over the licensing of which I have no control, I have little choice. All these libraries are located in the /content/assets folder of the backend source code, and the following licenses apply to them:

• Shadowbox (shadowbox-3.0.3 in the source) is licensed under its own Shadowbox license, which grants users the right to use the library as part of a (non-commercial) website. It does not grant redistribution rights, but due to technical difficulties and the fact that what’s available in the Bitbucket repository is exactly what’s available from my server at blog.sigurdhsson.org, I wouldn’t consider that availability to be “redistribution”. I encourage anyone who disagrees to contact me for further discussion; I could be wrong here since I’m not a lawyer.
• The jQuery px-to-em plugin (pxem.jQuery.js) is being used under the MIT License, which allows pretty much unrestricted use of the code, given due credit.
• #grid (hashgridscript.{js,css}) is licensed under the Apache license.
• Hyphenator (hyphenate.js) is licensed under the LGPL license.
• The typefaces Anonymous Pro (anonymouspro) and Gentium Plus (gentiumplus) are available under the SIL Open Font License.

All other parts of the source code (for the purposes of this license, the /content/posts, /content/media and /content/projects folders of the source code are not considered “code”; their license is described later) are written by me and licensed under the CC0 license (i.e. effectively public domain).

Textual content

For the purposes of licensing, consider the files in the /content/posts and /content/projects folders of the source code as well as the content generated by these to be “textual content”. Such content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Note that this does not apply to the comments made to posts, due to the fact that I’m not the author of them and that they are hosted by a third party, Disqus.

Media content

Media content consists of the files in the /content/media folder of the source code and all files derived or generated from these. They are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Usage outside these restrictions (e.g. for Commercial applications) may be negotiated; in that case, contact me and we may be able to work something out.