2026-01-11 -- Thinking about software licenses again
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I  have used very permissive licenses in the past. I just wanted to make
it easy for fellow "hackers" to use my code. If you see an  MIT-licensed
project, you know that you don't have to worry about anything.

I  *had*  considered  "Bad Actors".  But back then, a Bad Actor was some
company that takes my code and incorporates it into a proprietary  prod-
uct.  Like, someone takes my window manager, modifies it, and uses it in
an embedded device. Or someone uses my Gopher server  and  ...  I  don't
know, what would you do with that in a commercial product? Okay, anyway,
suppose  that  had happened. Then what? I would first have to know about
this violation and then I would have to sue  that  company.  This  whole
scenario was extremely unlikely.

But the situation has changed last year.

Now we have "AI" crawlers and I *know* that they are scraping my website
like  crazy. And now it is *evident* that they do not follow any license
requirements (assuming I had used the GPL). They  break  the  rules  and
everybody  knows it (and most people don't care at all, because look how
shiny it is).

So here's what's bugging me: Since I use permissive licenses, I have  no
right to complain about this. I still won't sue anybody, but even from a
"moral" standpoint, it's just my own fault. I allowed them to do this. I
enabled "AI" companies.

I  was living under the assumption that I just host a small website that
nobody really cares about. Maybe a few people, maybe sometimes parts  of
my code are useful to others. A small community.

That's  not  true  anymore. Huge companies make money by using my stuff.
Granted, just a tiny fraction, but still.

So, what can I do about it?

-   Take the website offline and move everything to Gopher or Gemini.
-   Switch my projects to GPLv3.

I think that just moving everything to Gopher is probably just as  naive
as my original approach. So maybe switch to GPLv3? For the vast majority
of my projects, I'm the sole copyright holder, so I can just do that.

My  gripe  with  the GPL is that it's so hard to understand. I literally
can't read the original document and understand what it's about. It's  a
long legal document. No way. The only thing I can do is read third-party
interpretations and then trust them. This isn't great.

Sigh. This needs some more thinking.