For the past 26 weeks I’ve been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I’ve received a few pieces of mail saying this is a “non-free” licence and questioning my use of it here. Some of them are quite polite, others have demanded I change the licence immediately (presumably “or else”). I’m not going to change the license, and here’s why.

There’s a discussion going on on my LUG mailing list today which seems to have diverged from its original topic to the question of the inclusion of officially supported non-free repositories in distributions: is this merely facilitating freedom or does it have more sinister implications for free software?