so, from silent ripping to shameless copying, passing through pretended inspiration or innocent replication, the work i give for free on my website has been reused (i’m avoiding the word plagiarized) quite a few times in many different places and forms.

indeed, i always claimed it was there for free, and the only thing i asked for was some recognition and proper credit. but i never stated it explicitly, as i counted in the fairness of the people, who come to the website to learn or get inspired (education should be for free). but of course we don’t all share the same standard of honesty, and despite i regularly found dishonest moves and offensive and actions, it never has bothered me that much.

things are getting much better lately – i believe people start to feel increasingly more exposed when they cheat on my work, so they’re changing their attitude, sadly motivated by fear rather than by uprightness. in any case, now i get emails asking me what kind of software license i distribute my work under… since i never explicitly state anything in my site about legal terms cause i felt it was unnecessary, but of course i understand that some people feel insecure about this “code of honor” way of thinking and unspoken rule of fairness that i assume everybody should naturally follow, and that they want to protect themselves against potential problems when they get to use my work/code in an event or product.

so, it seems i’ll now have to go through all the crap of licensing literature and shitty open source GPL, BSD, LGPL, CC and MIT fucking terms and learn, take an stupid official decision and publish it crystal clear somewhere in my site, in order to protect them from their own behaviour.

i know, the real world is not a fairy tale. but you know what, sometimes, only sometimes, i wish it was less fucked up and it was a little bit more like one. specially when I have pay the prize – who said i don’t have the right to be selfish too?