Starting a few days ago, the comments area on Jerry's Blog now contains a few words reminding you that your comment is a public work and may be quoted, copied, and shared freely by other people. This is simply an explicit disclaimer of what was always implicit, applicable to pretty much any blog comment on the internet. What's new is that large segments of this website, including Jerry's Blog, are now protected by the Gnu General Public License (GPL). A public license is sometimes called copyleft protection. Conventional copyright means that nobody can copy the work without explicit permission. Copyleft means that the public may freely copy it, but they cannot later claim a more restrictive copyright protection for themselves, even if they modify the work or incorporate some of their own ideas.
This is not usually an important concept for blog articles or comments. It is important for computer software. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) publishes the GPL license with the idea that software ought to be freely available. This is in sharp contrast with Microsoft's propietary mentality that they own their software, and if you want to use it, you gotta pay their high price. You can't copy nor modify nor share it. I hope you know that when you buy a new computer at WalMart or wherever, a large chunk of your purchase price goes to Microsoft for the pre-installed Windows operating system that you can never really own nor control. No, thanks. About 15 years ago, I started running Linux, a public-licensed operating system, on my home computer. More secure, more powerful, more freedom.
So now I'm trying to return the favor, to a small degree. It was also about 15 or 16 years ago that I started writing programs to analyze and solve Sudoku puzzles. This effort has evolved to become arguably the best Sudoku Analyzer on the web, and, since I personally wrote every line of its code, I could certainly claim conventional copyright ownership. So I do. But am now opening up those ownership rights a bit via the GPL agreement, saying that anyone who cares to do so may freely copy and modify my Sudoku software (and even make money with it, if you are more astute than I when it comes to sales and marketing.) What you may not do is claim propietary rights over it yourself, or restrict its use by others. This software freedom applies to my Sudoku Analyzer, and to most other CyberJerry content.
Most, but not all. There remain some private pages, whose contents and encryption techniques will die with me. Likewise I refuse to share scripts that pertain to personal data of blog members or of anyone who submits a CyberJerry feedback form. To see more specific details, see the new CyberJerry license page. You may read the GPL license with all its legalese --> here, or navigate to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more information.
2 comments:
Lenore Dec 7 2019 9:53am |
interesting knowledge..Does the c in the visual circle be on the left side if it is copyleft? Glad the master's literature are not under copyright laws. My favorite being Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Theologian's Tale, The Legend Beautiful, which ends
"Hadst thou stayed, I must have fled!" That is what the Vision said. It is a reflection by Longfellow on the true Spirit of Love. Well worth reading. |
 |
Yes, the backward c-in-a-circle is an unofficial symbol for copyleft. The symbol and the word 'copyleft' aren't really legal terms. The software is still copyrighted, but under a public license. Maybe (??) similar to classic public-domain literature, in that everybody can use it, but no one can claim exclusive rights.
|
