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Comment by benev | Hacker News Reader

So would we! There is a slight issue that in general, freelancers retain copyright over their own work, so we as a magazine can publish it, but we can't release it under a free licence. Where freelancers are happy with this (and we hope most of them will be), then we'll endeavour to do this.

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Why is that? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but why can't you make including content in your magazine predicated on the author agreeing to release it under a free license?

Releasing something under a free license is orthogonal to the authors retaining copyright over their work.

You're right, and this is exactly what we want to do but (why is there always a but?) this is highly unusual clause and while we're confident most of our contributors will accept it, we may have to waive it for some (though we really hope we don't have to). As a new magazine we're not confident to make a 100% promise at this stage.

Personally, I reckon you could do it; what's the going rate for a free lancer? Given the size and complexity of coding snippets, do they really have any value in and of themselves?

Just to be clear -- any code from the mag will be released under an open source licence. There's no question about that. This thread's about releasing the actual articles themselves (which we plan on doing after nine months -- more info on the campaign page).

My mistake; thanks for the clarification.

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