It’s all up for grabs

When I started writing my little guides, I pondered how I could best go about allowing people to repost my stuff wherever they want, while at the same time preserving the integrity of the documents and providing people with a means to say: “Hey, TwoRocks, you’re totally wrong about this and that. You suck! I hate you! I hate your dog! And you forgot this crucial little detail. Oh, and it would be nice if you could cover this aspect, too.” You drift my catch…

So what I’ve come up with is the following: I’m releasing all my documents under a so-called Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative License.

Now you may be asking yourself: “What the frak does that mean?” (Or: “What the frell?” — if your name’s not Adama and you’re more like a John Crichton kind of guy…) It’s actually pretty straightforward: you can republish my documents in whatever medium you please (on the ‘net, on a CD or DVD along with your own stuff, etc. etc.), as long as you:

• publish the document in its entirety (including the link pointing back to the document’s “home on the web”) and don’t alter it in any way
• don’t charge a thing for it (that also means, for example, that you may not charge for a CD, DVD, or an eBook etc. that contains any of my documents. Capiche?)

That’s essentially it. The only reason I don’t want you to create derivatives is because I want to avoid confusion, caused by a “bazillion” different versions floating around “out there”. I do welcome feedback, and I always include a “hit me with your comments” link to a discussion forum thread in every document. Then, whenever I get around to it, I sift through those comments, maybe do some additional research, and publish a new release version of the respective document. That’s why those thingies have a version number.

If you’re interested in the full legal yadda-yadda text of the license, just click on the Creative Commons link above and click on “Legal Code” at the bottom of the landing page.