I originally had a big, far-reaching article in which I'd muse about copyright, trademark, and other things I don't really have any authority or knowledge about. But the point was about the coding posts I did before and, time willing, will do in the future. So far, they've been released in a way that seems to be a dying breed: Public domain.
I won't claim that this is a solution, or that others should or must follow suit, but coding can be a legal minefield these days. Licensing, restrictions, is this for personal or commercial use, all of that. And that's just with code you buy! The GPL seems to be a response to this problem, but it carries its own mess with it, rules and restrictions under the guise of freedom. There's the BSD license, which I like the most, but really...
There's some snippets of code that I don't intend to get fame or fortune from. And I don't want to add to the burden of "Can I use this?" for another programmer. So, public domain. Free to use in any way, shape, or form they want. It adds to the general commonwealth, and takes the burden of enforcing off my hands.
"But Blain," one might say, "how do you combat someone taking your work, and claiming it for their own?" I really dislike the terms "Art theft" and "Intellectual property violation", when there's a perfectly good word for it. One that uses stigma for enforcement, with no fancy legalese needed for its karmic backlash to take effect. When someone claims another's work as their own, be it text, music, or math; be it public domain, unpublished, or commercially owned; we call that plagiarism.
