Licensing and more LugRadio!

License

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have finally got around to doing it. Given that this weblog is ‘publishing’, it makes sense to provide a proper license for anyone who wishes to make use of the material for other purposes. The obvious thing to choose is a Creative Commons license. I have chosen the Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs license.

This means that anyone can copy, display or distribute the content under the following conditions:

• You must give me, the author, credit when you do so (Attribution);
• You may not use this work for any commercial purpose (Non-Commercial);
• You may not alter, transform, produce derivate works or build upon this content (No-Derivs).

Note that this license actually gives you more rights than standard copyright law, which applies by default and means that you cannot copy it at all. I was unsure whether to choose this license or the slightly less restrictive version which also allows derivative works to be created. For example, some friends and colleagues are using the Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license for their work, which permits derivatives as long as these derivatives are provided under the same license as the original (i.e. also allow free distribution and copying, and further derivatives etc.). However, after some discussion, and considering that these weblog posts are essentially “my thoughts”, and that a ‘derivative work’ doesn’t really make sense, I opted for the NoDerivs version. I plan to license tutorials and HOWTO guides under more permissive licenses, since they are purposely written with the intention that they may be improved upon by others. In any case, any of the ‘conditions’ may be waived by agreement with me. So, when I’m famous and a book is going to be published containing my work, I can, by agreement (and presumably payment) waive the ‘non-commercial use’ clause.

LugRadio

Also, today is the day that Season Two Episode One of LugRadio is out, hurrah! I plan to listen to this tomorrow. There are some personnel changes afoot in the LugRadio team – Sparkes is leaving after the next episode (which has in fact already been recorded). This is a great shame, because he is in my opinion the funniest of them all. In discussion with him yesterday, I told him that he would be considered the “Pete Best of LugRadio”, which entertained him greatly.

Also on the subject of LugRadio, many ‘fans of the show’ chat about it (and considerably more besides) on the #lugradio channel on freenode. I have put together some interesting statistics (covering the whole of October up to about 1700 today) using the pisg utility. Be warned that this statistics page contains quotes from people on the channel and as such has Some Rude Words. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it’s funny. Enjoy

🙂