Comments on: Copyright question (and no answer yet)

By: Christophe

Christophe — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:09:14 +0000

Hi Ryan!

I have decided to release most of my scripts under the MIT license, which basically means free to reuse with attribution. Some of the latest versions can be found in my SharePoint User’s Toolkit with the license terms:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/sharepoint-user-toolkit

My preferred way in forums is still to link to the original post. This way the reader gets not only the script, but also comments and later enhancements or bug fixes.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:55:32 +0000

Hi Christophe – did you come to a decision about this tricky subject?

I’ve included one of your scripts in a an answer over on StackOverflow.com (attributed)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3269039/text-to-html-in-sharepoint-using-javascript/3280003

If you would prefer me to remove the code and just leave a ref to your blog then let me know!

Cheers…Ryan

By: Easy Tabs Lite, version 4.0 beta « Path to SharePoint

Easy Tabs Lite, version 4.0 beta « Path to SharePoint — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:35:03 +0000

[...] I explained in a previous post, original content published on the Web is copyrighted, even if the copyright notice is not [...]

By: Christophe

Christophe — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:59:28 +0000

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Dave. How would you justify your position?
Let me play the devil’s advocate and list a few reasons why this is not a good idea:
- if as the author I decide to make my content available for free, I’d like to make sure people who reuse it keep the original spirit and don’t try to monetize it. This is where copyright comes into play (known as “copyleft” in this case).
- tons of duplicates would be created by people who just care about generating traffic. This would create a wall between the readers and the author (of course, don’t expect these people to link back to the original article). The readers would post questions or comments on these fakes without getting any response.
- from experience, even if people’s intentions are good, they won’t follow up and update their post to match updates made on the original article. A classical scenario also seen in file shares and mailboxes, with multiple versions of the truth.

I am not making this up, this really happened to me and other bloggers like Mark Miller or Peter Allen. For example, search the Web for “sharepoint theTDs” and you’ll find many copies of my Text to HTML script. How many show or point to the last version?

I am not questioning the “reuse” part of your comment, but the “as they see fit” part. The WWW works the same as a SharePoint farm. No governance leads to chaos.

By: Dave Coleman

Dave Coleman — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:40:52 +0000

Great article and very true a mine field but by publishing our thoughts/work should that not be open to the the entire SharePoint community to reuse as they see fit? Only my thoughts Dave