License and copyright

Licensing your work

You'll be licensing things you post to this site--comments, videos, artwork and articles--under a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-ShareAlike license. 

When you signed up for an account, or posted a comment, you agreed that your contributions would be licensed under a CC-BY-SA license. That means when somebody else thinks what you said is pure genius or utter balderdash, they can take it and change it as they please, provided that, if they pass it along, they do so under the same CC-BY-SA license and give you credit. Learn more about Creative Commons.

But we're flexible and we love good content.  If you have a work that you can't license under the CC-BY-SA license (like your publisher won't let you), talk to us.  Maybe we can work something out.

More about image copyright

We also support CC for openly licensing images. We use CC-BY-SA licenses for the illustrations on our site and are excited when our work is reused to create new imagery.

We ask that you also use a CC-BY-SA license for your contributions.  This means that any source materials you use must also be licensed under terms that permit further reuse.  Source materials must be (1) in the public domain; (2) licensed under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license; or (3) licensed to you by the original artist with the necessary rights.  If your source materials are under a CC license, you will need to also provide the necessary attribution to the original work.

Repurposing our work

Notice that most images on the site have a CC-BY-SA indicia in the lower right corner. This means the image was completely original or has been created using openly available assets and reintroduced in its new form under a CC-BY-SA license for others to use.

Beneath the image we hyperlink sources from which assets were pulled. If the source says "opensource.com" a member of the opensource.com team has created the image from scratch and has published it using a CC-BY-SA license.  When you reuse the work on our site, please use the information given for each image in the required attribution.

In very limited circumstances, such as current events, we may need to use an image that is not licensed under Creative Commons. These images will not display the CC-BY-SA indicia and should not be repurposed.