You know that little badge at the bottom of every post? The one that says a Creative Commons license and links somewhere?

I didn’t put it there.

It came with the theme. I’m using Chirpy, a Jekyll theme, and it ships with CC BY 4.0 embedded by default in its locale data. For the first few weeks of writing, I didn’t even notice it. It was just boilerplate — a piece of open-source courtesy that felt like standard practice for tech blogs.

Then one day I was previewing a new post and my eyes landed on the footer. I clicked the link out of curiosity, read what CC BY 4.0 actually said, and realized I had no idea what I’d signed up for.

The Rabbit Hole

I learned that Creative Commons is a spectrum, not a switch. There’s a whole family of licenses — BY (attribution only), BY-SA (share-alike), BY-NC (non-commercial), BY-ND (no derivatives) — and each one says something different about how people can use your work. The “4.0” part is the version, updated in 2013 with international language so it holds up across jurisdictions.

The default my theme chose was CC BY 4.0. That’s the most permissive option: anyone can copy, remix, sell, translate, or republish my writing, as long as they credit me. One rule. Clean. Very “open web.”

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that leaving the default was itself a decision — just an unexamined one.

Why It Matters

I realized that a blog’s license is like its terms of service. If it’s vague or inherited without thought, readers and potential reusers have to guess what I’m comfortable with. That ambiguity creates friction for the people I want to share my work — hobbyists, students, educators, other writers — while leaving the door wide open for anyone building a commercial product around my writing.

I wanted clarity. For myself and for anyone who lands on this page and wonders, “Can I quote this in my newsletter? Can I translate this? Can I put this in a book?”

The answer should be obvious from reading the footer. Not from sending me a DM.

Why CC BY-NC 4.0

I landed on CC BY-NC 4.0. Here’s why.

It preserves the core of what I want — sharing, adapting, remixing, quoting — while adding one boundary: non-commercial. If you’re a blogger writing a roundup and want to quote a paragraph, go ahead. If you’re building a paid course and my post fits perfectly as a chapter, let’s talk. That “let’s talk” creates a conversation instead of a vacuum. It gives me agency without shutting down legitimate sharing.

There’s a second reason too. I cross-post some stories to Medium, and I might eventually enable the partner program and put those posts behind a paywall. The license doesn’t stop me from doing that; as the copyright holder, I always retain the right to monetize my own work. But it does prevent someone else from scraping my writing and republishing it behind their own paywall. That distinction matters.

Is NC a fuzzy boundary? Yes. Company newsletters, Patreon-funded creators, and ad-supported blogs all live in gray areas. But a fuzzy line is better than no line. It at least signals intent and forces a conversation.

One Caveat

The license covers my writing. Code snippets in posts may be under a different license (usually MIT or Apache 2.0). If you’re copying a code block, check the site repo.

Everything else? Share it. Adapt it. Translate it. Link back. If money changes hands, let’s talk first.

That’s the deal.