The 115 columns I wrote for BYTE.com are now restored to the public Web. I took this step reluctantly, and would have preferred that the original namespace remain intact, but so be it. Those columns that have continuing value can now weave themselves back into the fabric of the Web.
This exercise was another chance to experiment with Creative Commons licensing, which had raised some questions. In the case of these columns, I chose the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 option, following the logic expressed by Denise Howell (via Scripting News).
Based on comments, I've also rethought my use of the CC license for LibraryLookup. My thinking on this was quite badly muddled, I'm afraid, mixing patent and copyright issues. As Matt Brubeck pointed out, a copyright has no bearing on patents, but publication alone is a hedge against potential frivolous use.
In the end, I concluded that LibraryLookup was a poor test case for the application of CC licensing to software. So I switched to the more basic Attribution license. I spent quite a while staring at the screen before I decided what to write in the Description metadata field. Here is what I finally said: A performance, expressed in text, data, and code.
Is it software? Phil Wainewright has a great essay on his Loosely Coupled weblog today: Software, Jim, but not as we know it.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/12/23.html#a555