Mike Bland

A while back, I was approached by a staff member at a particular website about running my Test Mercenaries blog post as an article on their website. Flattered as I was, I wound up turning down the offer, and added the explicit copyright notices at the bottom of each post. It’s not because I want to profit from my writing or restrict access to it—after all, it’s all freely available here on this blog—but more because I wanted to retain some degree of control over the context in which my writing appears.

Thing is, philosophically, I’m aligned with the notion that information wants to be free¹ and that decision has kind of haunted me since. To a large extent, I’ve been writing so that folks could have access to and benefit from all the history and ideas that emerged from my experiences at Google, and trying keep a tight rein on their redistribution feels a bit hypocritical and insecure. Hence, as of today, all of the blog posts on this site are licensed for redistribution via the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, with restrictions and further explanations posted on the new site policies page. To summarize from that page:

Basically, the policy is, feel free to copy my content so long as you link back to me, don’t try to pass off my content as your own, and don’t try to make it sound like there’s an official business or otherwise collaborative connection with me without my explicit written consent. Be careful with images or videos or other bits I might’ve incorporated from other sources. Beyond that, do what thou wilt.

It’s not like I expect my writing to spread like wildfire across the interwebs and burn a path across the intellectual landscape of human civilization. However, for what it’s worth, here’s to making sure what little I have to offer on this blog remains universally accessible and useful for those who might benefit from or be entertained by it.

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