We're Going "Free Culture"

That’s right, I’ve really done it now. I’ve officially changed the license for all content on this site to a Free Culture compatible one. In the past all content was available under the CC BY-SA-NC 3.0 license, but the past is the past and now we’re rocking a much simpler CC BY 4.0 license; also known as the Creative Commons Attribution License.

What does this mean for you? If you see a cool code snippet and want to use it, use it! If you like one of my blog posts and want to include it in your self-published (or publishing-house published) book, do it. If you want to use some of my free code in another one of your free (or not) projects, go for it! And hopefully we can avoid things like this from happening, which is why I explicitly retain the right to dual (or triple or quadruple) license any content.

Look, if you need some code, an idea, an image, whatever for a project but it doesn’t “work” with CC, just ask me. I’ll probably give you whatever you want.

You might wonder, “why?” The answer really boils down to two main points:

The first is this: I stand on the shoulders of giants. If it weren’t for the fact that HTML was designed to be open I probably never would have been able to learn it with trusty old ‘View source’ and Notepad. If it weren’t for all the great how-to blogs and tips ‘n tricks websites I could never have innovated anything new myself. The stuff that’s “mine” is probably on like 5% mine, so why should I stop somebody else from taking the next step? Just because I don’t want them to make money? That’s petty, and wrong.

And the second, this: I’m not a professional programmer. I don’t make a living by writing code. I make a living by selling my ideas and my expertise. Most of the ideas I get paid for don’t exist on this blog, mainly because they can’t. They’re solutions that are developed for specific clients to solve specific problems. So the things I share here are the universals that those solutions can be distilled down to. Use them! But if you need specifics, contact me.