Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff.
When it comes to the whole non-commercial use, I admit that I bought into a pretty powerful narrative: that I could very well be sitting on valuable content which some evil businessperson could exploit for their own gain - if only I didn’t have that non-commercial clause. Then I realized how I plead with journals, conferences, and other academic sources to take my content, do whatever they want to with it, and publish it without giving me a dime. This is because in academia, exposure is far more valuable than money.
It is not likely at all that some publisher is going to stumble upon my site, compile all my posts, copyedit them, and publish them for a profit. The copyleft nature of these licenses guarantees that they must license their derivative works under the same license, and I don’t know of very few commercial presses who have printed books that are freely licensed - why sell something everyone can get for free? Yet even if they did, I would be quite grateful. If they edited everything to include, I don’t know, Nazi propaganda, both licenses ensure that my name cannot be used to endorse the derivative work.
So I have decided to release everything under two licenses: the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, and the GNU Free Documentation License 2.0 or later. These licenses are similar, although there are a few nuanced differences that make them incompatible. Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, while many other wikis and blogs use a Creative Commons License. This ensures that content on my site can be reused on all sites that use these two licenses.
The How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike by R. Stuart Geiger, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This work is also licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 2.0 or greater, see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
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