This website, as well as my personal website and Rescued by Code, licenses material under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, I've been using the Attribution Non-Commerical license, popularly known as CC BY-NC. My joint venture with Abby Yu, The Take-Home Message web comic, has been even more restrictive and has been licensing content under the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license (CC BY-NC-SA).

These choice of licenses is something that's been on my mind for a while. I've known that I'm not being as open as I could be and maybe this has stemmed from an unwarranted (not to mention unlikely) fear that someone would take all my blog posts and somehow seek to profit from them.

Today I saw a tweet by Rogier Kievit (@rogierK) that has helped me change my mind:

Three posts why CC-BY is better than restrictive licenses https://t.co/C34dWcixpu https://t.co/VnIgnJMXNh https://t.co/QesEriirXm
— rogier kievit (@rogierK) November 13, 2015

I found the third link — something that is now over a decade old — particularly persuasive and accordingly I have switched all of my website licenses to CC-BY. Apparently this means that all of my writings now fall into the category of Free Cultural Works. I am grateful to Abby Yu to agreeing to this change for The Take-Home Message.

This change also means that someone can now use my blog posts to write the definitive book on JABBA-awards…just as long as they give me appropriate attribution.