License Change from MIT to BSD-3-Clause for Code Snippets (2023/04/13)

As of now, source code inside articles in MathSoftware.Engineer are licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License, which supersedes the initial MIT License.

In the beginning, I provided the MIT License to the code snippets of the Blog and mathsoftware.engineer as well. This was because I thought articles would contain a vast amount of content but a minority of code.

That meant the CC-BY-4.0 License would apply to most of my article content and the (previous) MIT License to just the code snippets.

As the platform grows as a domain-specific system¹, I’ve realized that there’s much more code involved² besides mere snippets embedded into articles.

Both licenses —MIT and BSD-3-Clause— are pretty similar and permissive, but BSD-3-Clause is the license par excellence I’ve frequently used for relevant projects while leaving MIT for the most ordinary ones ³.

So, I usually provide relevant dev projects (non-articles) with the BSD-3-Clause License, and now that source code is getting relevant in article projects, I’m getting rid of the MIT License for code snippets in articles, so both dev and article projects use the same license for source code.

Notice that the existing CC-BY-4.0 License is not affected by any of this as it only applies to content. Hence, in addition to the “content license” (e.g., CC), I also provide a “source code license” (e.g., BSD).

For example, in Drawing a Tree on Canvas with XY Coordinates | mathsoftware.engineer there’s a submodule with a complete web app source code, and also in binary form at its EP app path, so that’s what I mean about the DSLs. Articles are source code like any other app for me (and any modern software development), but the difference is that they also contain content like text or images.

Be aware that the user is always responsible for checking what license they’re given and complying with it and that this article is not legal advice but an informative update.

The preference for BSD-3-Clause is because it’s more academically friendly regarding the explicit clauses about attribution for both source code and binary forms, as well as the non-endorsement clause.

Although MIT and some other licenses are great licenses I also use and will keep using, my preferred choice as copyright holder was always BSD-3, which is a more conformable fit now that source code is more present in my written articles.

Today, I dropped the MIT License in favor of the preferred BSD-3-Clause License for source code like code snippets or DSLs written inside articles, so that content is still under the same CC-BY-4.0 License, but source code is now under the BSD-3-Clause License which matches better with the source-code-richer resources available now in the platform by being more consistent regarding already established standards.

Bibliography

I apply the same MathSwe principles for both designing code and writing articles as I devise everything homogeneously ↩
Articles are a DSL as well, then notice that “Language” in “DSL” implies a lot of code that otherwise would be plain text ↩
As a copyright holder, when licensing my OSS/free-culture projects, I choose from my preferred licenses: BSD-3-Clause, MIT, Apache-2.0, and GPL-3.0-or-later for source code, and CC-BY-4.0 for content ↩