Towards Creative Commons

Since starting at Cloudera I've been doing more public speaking than ever before, presenting to both my colleagues and at meetups and technical conferences around the country. In preparing my talks and slide decks, I've noticed it's hard to find good imagery for use in presentations. Now I could just swipe content from the Internet, which is what many presenters seem to do, but I want to be legit.

I discovered Wikimedia Commons pretty early on, and I can usually find one or two suitable images in the public domain (usually created by government employees), but often I get stuck behind the share-alike or commercial-use clauses of the various Creative Commons licenses. In most cases my usage isn't for-profit, but I still don't feel like I'm on solid ground, especially if I'm not in a position to be able to share the work.

There are a variety of imagery sites that offer up royalty-free public domain images, but I can't always find what I need. In some cases I end up taking a photo myself, since I know what it is I'm looking for, but this isn't always an option.

At some point I realized that I've been part of the problem.

I've been taking from those generous creators without giving back; the vast majority of my photographs on Flickr are copyrighted, a throwback to when I was concerned about who would be using my content.

Similarly, in all the years that I've been writing I've always reserved all rights to my works. It seemed a natural decision at the time, but now it doesn't strike me as correct. If bad actors are going to steal my content without payment or attribution, they aren't going to care whether I've elected to reserve my rights or not, so I may as well offer the content to all those good actors who might care to benefit.

So I've changed my mind, and so I plan to migrate to more permissive licensing for both my writing and my photography. I'm still on the fence about detailed photographs of individuals.

Choosing a licensing scheme.

While I would like to encourage others to share alike, I don't want to restrict people who may not be able to. So I believe that most of the content here is going to be wide-open, attribution only for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC 4.0).

I don't have it all figured out yet, but these steps already feel kinda good.

Last Modified: 2020-08-09

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