Good call. Not everything should or has to be open source or free to use.

Yeah, I wanted to embrace all of it as much as possible but for all our actual content all it does is enable an easy get-out when trying to take down websites set up that just entirely scrape out content live on the same day.

Last edited by Liam Dawe on 11 Oct 2023 at 6:05 pm UTC

I wrote some popular articles (compiling Linux kernel, installing Slackware Linux) that made it to Linux Today and Kernelnewbies.org.

This was 20'ish years ago, what I got were people asking permission to use my articles. I had to refuse because I wrote them for our site and it wouldn't have been fair to the webmaster/owner.

That's what I said... "not everything is open source" when I got replies that didn't like my answer.

Yeah, I wanted to embrace all of it as much as possible but for all our actual content all it does is enable an easy get-out when trying to take down websites set up that just entirely scrape out content live on the same day.

Erm, CC BY-SA 4.0 explicitly allows for commercial redistribution. It is not an "easy get-out" when you specifically tell people to go ahead and commercially re-post the articles (unless those sites "forgot" to attribute properly, in which case they are breaking the license).

Not sure if there is a cc license that disallows scraping, but I suspect that CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 should cover that, since said scraping would, I presume, have monetary gain in mind.

Any ways, I can see why you would prefer to publish the articles under conventional copyrights. After all, it's much less exhausting to have a blanket "no copying" policy, where you don't need to explain, using a non-legally-tested license, how copying is allowed in one case, but not another.

Last edited by emphy on 12 Oct 2023 at 4:31 am UTC

Erm, CC BY-SA 4.0 explicitly allows for commercial redistribution. It is not an "easy get-out" when you specifically tell people to go ahead and commercially re-post the articles (unless those sites "forgot" to attribute properly, in which case they are breaking the license).

I am obviously aware of what the license offered. It was mainly put in so that if I ever vanished people could re-host. Most sites didn’t attribute at all.

Erm, CC BY-SA 4.0 explicitly allows for commercial redistribution. It is not an "easy get-out" when you specifically tell people to go ahead and commercially re-post the articles (unless those sites "forgot" to attribute properly, in which case they are breaking the license).

I am obviously aware of what the license offered. It was mainly put in so that if I ever vanished people could re-host. Most sites didn’t attribute at all.

In that case, I'd be interested to see whether the change to conventional copyrights changes the situation at all. I rather get the impression that the sites in question are of the sort that will copy regardless of the license (I am obviously not going to seek them out to check).

This is such a symptom of how deeply broken the internet has become. You were willing to give very generous rights so that people could re-publish your stuff with attribution. But it is not even "people" that are plagiarizing you, it is a bunch of bots whose owners can't even be bothered to read and select articles themselves, and just scrape stuff in bulk. And search engines just prioritize those shitty sites over the original sources, thus enabling the exploitation. There is little to be done because those are just barely-above-ground sites that couldn't care less about you, or their own reputations. Nothing short of a legal notice will do, and the latter only barely.

Hi Liam, does making article under CC BY-SA after a cooldown period (much like scientific publication, at least in the EU) would solve the problem.

Article are released under copyright for GoL and are licensed under CC-BY-SA after 6 month (this is the time choosen by the EU for scientific article but you can use something else).

Hi Liam, does making article under CC BY-SA after a cooldown period (much like scientific publication, at least in the EU) would solve the problem.

Article are released under copyright for GoL and are licensed under CC-BY-SA after 6 month (this is the time choosen by the EU for scientific article but you can use something else).

That’s actually a really interesting idea. Will look into it.

Article are released under copyright for GoL and are licensed under CC-BY-SA after 6 month (this is the time choosen by the EU for scientific article but you can use something else).

That’s actually a really interesting idea. Will look into it.

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be fine with my handful of oddball submissions being handled that way.