[pk]

Lim Cheng Soon, the creator of the Hacker Monthly, deserves a good deal of credit for securing the rights to reprint all of the content in this magazine. I'm sure that was the most time-consuming part of putting this together. In the Curator's Note on the second page he says, "I've also exchanged near hundreds of emails asking for reprint permissions."

Projects like these make a good case for open-content licenses like Creative Commons' and the GNU Free Documentation License. If all the articles included in the magazine used the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (which allows content to be reused as long as any modified versions are available under the same terms), Lim could have saved countless hours by not having to explicitly ask permission for each piece he included.

Lim, if you're listening, perhaps you would consider encouraging the people you talk to to license their works under a Creative Commons license. This could make things a lot easier the next time around if you pull material from the same blogs, etc.

[j_baker]

Erm... If I were to license my content under a creative commons license, it would be a non-commercial one. If anyone wants to republish my work, fine. If they want to republish my work commercially, that's a whole different ballgame. I don't like the idea of others (like this magazine) making money off of my content without giving me a cut.

[dionidium]

Why? As it stands you're receiving no compensation for contributions to this site. If someone else uses them in a way that's valuable to others then you'll still get no money, but your thoughts/ideas will receive more attention and benefit others, too.

Given that you literally gain nothing by preventing this use -- I'm assuming you're not fielding other offers for usage of your HN posts -- I don't see why you'd care. I realize this is a common gut reaction, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you don't like it more explicitly.

[jonah]

It appears that most of these articles are not original HN posts but rather pieces published on the author's blog or other place and linked to from HN. At least some of these people are deriving advertising revenue from people reading the article.

[mbrubeck]

That's a common and understandable sentiment, but plenty of us are happy with less-restrictive licenses. In fact, I see that you have published code under BSD and MIT licenses, so you must not object strongly to people making money off that.

[j_baker]

Although your point is reasonable, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges. If someone uses my code, they won't be making money off of it directly (if they did, I'd be highly surprised). If someone publishes and sells an article that I wrote, that is making money off of my work directly.

If you genuinely prefer a less-restrictive license, more power to you. But the argument that people should license their work under a CC license to make things easier for publishers is a bit like my boss saying "Why don't you just work for free so I don't have to go through the hassle of having to pay you?"

[paulgb]

Four or five years ago I was contacted by a company that wanted to redistribute a program I wrote in a for-profit CD-ROM compilation. I think that's a more direct analogy to the magazine situation. I happily agreed. I get the emotional difference between giving something away for free for personal use and giving something away for someone else's profit, but is there any logical justification of the distinction?

Now I license my content as CC-BY-SA. Recently a for-profit blog took some graphs from a post I wrote and added context in German. This was totally within the lines of the license, and I thought it was pretty cool that people in Germany were now able to benefit from my work.

[mbrubeck]

"Why don't you just work for free..?"

But the contributors like pg are already creating and publishing these articles for free. Most of them benefit only indirectly from their writing, and that benefit is increased, not decreased, when the writing is distributed to more readers.

[j_baker]

Maybe I gave the wrong impression. Does somebody want to use a blog post in a magazine that probably won't pay much in royalties anyway? I'd probably let them use it for free. Does say Newsweek want to use it? You bet your ass they'd better pay me for it.

I suppose it's less about wanting to get paid for my work as much as it is wanting to be able to control whether or not I get paid for my work. If I think that somebody has a valid reason to use my blog posts, then I might let them. But I do want them to get my permission first. Maybe some people are comfortable with giving anyone and everyone the ability to use their writings in whatever commercial environment they want to. I personally am not.

...but regardless "It'll make the publishers' lives easier!" isn't a very convincing argument to me. :-)

[pk]

The decision on whether to release your work under a free license depends a lot on the purpose you write it for. If you're writing, say, a blog to express your thoughts or as a self-promotion tool (e.g. to make your name recognizable to people in your field, like Joel Spolsky, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Paul Graham), then you loose nothing by allowing your work to be disseminated as widely as possible. Maybe you stand to make a little bit of money from a particularly popular piece, but for someone like Spolsky, the income from a contract resulting from his blog's popularity is likely much more than he could expect to make from publishing a few of his blog entries.

If you intend to be a writer, you might think about things a little differently. As a given, you'll want to get paid for what you write, probably by being commissioned by a magazine for a piece or by working as a staff writer. In this case, you probably feel squeamish about giving your work away for free since you're sometimes able to make money off it.

If you're already willing to publish a piece for free on your blog, it seems unlikely that you would later be able to sell it to a magazine. Magazines seem to like original content, and (with the exception of Hacker Monthly) wouldn't want to republish something already out there.

A few people have experimented with republishing their blogs as books. The two that come to mind are PG's Hackers and Painters (his essays weren't exactly a blog, but they're pretty similar in that they're regularly updated freely accessible online content) and Scott Adams' Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. From what I've gathered, both of these had limited success, making this strategy of generating income from blog content seem rather unfeasible.

The only remaining strategy for making money off your blog is ads. This has certainly been proven to work, although only for blogs in the top one percent or so in terms of readership. Boing Boing, the most read blog on the web, licenses it's content under a Creative Commons license, and it doesn't seem to have hurt it much. XKCD also releases all its content under a CC license. (They both use the Attribution-Non Commercial license, which does raise some questions about what would happen if they removed the non commercial clause.)

So, if you're not in the top one percent of blogs, it seems like you don't have much to loose by giving your content away, and having it available in as many places as possible. You can turn the notoriety you gain from people listening to your thoughts and ideas into something profitable if you like, such as promotion for contract work, publicity for a book you write, or even starting a startup incubator. Don't get caught up in the details of the value of a few blog posts, think big picture.

[j_baker]

Now this is a much more convincing argument than your previous one. I might actually give the issue more consideration now. :-)

[sp332]

Does that mean my ISP owes you money for sending me a copy of your content for a profit?