Creative Commons 4.0I recently read the Creative Commons announcement, CC’s Next Generation Licenses — Welcome Version 4.0!. This made me think more about licensing in general, as it has been a topic receiving increased attention recently in Open Source/Tech communities. I think it's a very important subject that anyone involved in Open Source should have at least some knowledge about.

Incorrectly or unlicensed software (or any other digital resource for that matter) can become a serious barrier to people attempting to reuse published works. I received my first exposure to the this when I was contributing to the Ubuntu project.

Since then I've become quite a proponent of making sure resources are properly licensed.

I was thrilled when GitHub made it a priority to encourage and facilitate hosted projects having conspicuous and unambiguous licensing. They even made a site, choosealicense.com, to guide users through the process.

You can imagine I was quite surprised when I realized I never put a proper copyright/usage notice on the blog. That said, as of now this blog is officially licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. That means:

You are free to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

  • ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

"4.0 It's here." image was created by the Creative Commons organization and is used under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 license,