Yes, the Wongery itself continues to be and probably will always be unprofitable (I have so far made exactly zero units of currency from the Wongery, where which units of currency you choose doesn't of course matter since zero is the same in all of them), but that's not what the title is about. What the title does refer to should become apparently shortly, but I concede this this is another case in which I spent way too much time trying to think of a good title for the blog post and eventually went with a title I really didn't think was very good just because I figured I'd already spent too much time on it. I am bad at titles. I am bad at everything.

Anyway, though, so what is this blog post about? Well, alas, I haven't got as much done as I'd like within the last month. (That's not what the blog post is about either, but as you have no doubt noticed by now if you have read previous posts I am seemingly incapable of writing a post without rambling on extensively before getting to the point.) I have finally posted one new article in the Central Wongery mainspace, which I suppose is better than the zero new articles that have characterized many previous months, but still is very much not great. But I did get one thing done on the Wongery yesterday that I suppose may be worthy of comment, even though it's not really something I'd planned to do at all until a day or two ago.

This came about because I was reading, for reasons explaining which would require a further lengthy digression that I will exercise uncharacteristic willpower in refraining from getting into, the rulebook for a role-playing game called Mythic. This game was released under a Creative Commons license, and it occurred to me that this is another game I'd like to eventually release content for in the Wongery's RPG space. The problem, however, is exactly which Creative Commons license it was released under—not CC BY or CC BY-SA, but CC BY-NC, the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license, which expressly forbade the use of the work for commercial purposes.

Why was this a problem? Well, not because I wanted to use the work for commercial purposes—as I've stated before, everything in the Wongery's Gamespace is and will always remain completely free. And even if the Wongery itself does eventually make money through Patreon/Ko-fi or merchandise or licensing our content (which would certainly be nice, but of which there seems to be no immediate prospect), that still wouldn't present an issue; as the Creative Commons FAQ makes clear, "CC’s definition [of NonCommercial] does not turn on the type of user: ...if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term." So even if the Wongery is making money in other ways (which we currently are very much not, but hope springs eternal), we'd still be in the clear releasing free content for Mythic and other properties released under CC BY-NC licenses, as long as we weren't making money from those. (At least, I'm like 99% sure that's the case, but I am not anything remotely resembling a lawyer.) And in fact I guess in the past I hadn't seen any issue with using content released under a CC BY-NC license, since some of the other games I'd already planned to release content for in the Gamespace are also released under such a license. But there's one hitch that hadn't occurred to me until recently.

Specifically, I think what brought me to recognize the problem was when I happened to glance at the License Compatibility Chart on the CC Wiki. This chart showed under which different Creative Commons licenses content could be remixed—that is, whether or not a derivative work could be released incorporating sources released under two particular different CC licenses, and still comport with the license terms. And, in particular, the CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA licenses were not compatible. Short of negotiating additional licensing terms with the rightsholders, there was no way to legally create a derivative work mixing content released (only) under the CC BY-NC license with content released (only) under the CC BY-SA license.

Now, that wouldn't prevent us from releasing Gamespace material for Mythic based on content from the Wongery. We own the content from the Wongery; we can do whatever we want with it and don't have to abide by our licensing terms. What it would prevent is for someone else to release material for Mythic based on content from the Wongery—since the former was released under CC BY-NC and the latter under CC BY-SA. But we want to enable other people to release material based on the Wongery content. As I've said before, the only reason we're not just releasing all the Wongery content under a CC BY license or into the public domain is because if someone wants to make a big-budget feature film or video game based on Wongery content, we do want to reserve the right to make some money from that. (Yes, yes, I know the chances of anyone ever wanting to make a feature film or video game based on Wongery content are vanishingly small, but again, hope springs eternal, whether or not hope realistically has any business springing.) But if someone wants to release their own free game supplement incorporating Wongery material, sure, we definitely don't want to get in the way of that.

And so, as is so often the case, something occurred to me that really should have occurred to me a long time ago, and that almost certainly would have occurred to me a long time ago were I not a complete and utter idiot. Namely, that I could just release the content of the Central Wongery (and Public Wongery) mainspace under a CC BY-NC license.

That doesn't mean the CC BY-NC license replaces the CC BY-SA license, nor that the Wongery content is released under a license combining the two. There is a license that combines the terms of the CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License (CC BY-NC-SA), which requires derivative works to be released under the same license and forbids the use of the content for commercial purposes. But that's not the license the Wongery content is released under, and it's not equivalent to releasing the content under CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA licenses. Release under both licenses means the terms are an or, not an and; the creator of a derivative work may choose the terms of either license to follow. If you aren't making commercial use of your derivative work but aren't comfortable sharing it for other people to remix and reuse, then you can follow the terms of the CC BY-NC license and ignore the CC BY-SA. If you do want to sell your work commercially but are okay with sharing it for other people to reuse, you can follow the terms of the CC BY-SA license and ignore the CC BY-NC. You can follow the terms of both licenses (and release your own work under both licenses^[1]), but you don't have to.

Updating the relevant pages and text on the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery to reflect these new licensing terms was a bit more of a hassle than I expected, because changing the licensing text at the footer of the wiki pages required a change to the LocalSettings.php file. This wouldn't have been a big deal, except that I was doing this at work, which meant I was away from my desktop computer and had only my laptop—and the FTP program I use, FileZilla, didn't have any of my passwords or login info stored on my laptop. (Which itself was odd, because I could have sworn I'd used FileZilla on my laptop before, and presumably would have stored my site info when I did so. Had I deleted my passwords for some reason? I certainly don't remember doing so, and can't think of any good reason I would have done so. Huh.) This still wouldn't have been much of a problem, because I did have a FileZilla password file stashed away in a folder in my OneDrive cloud storage, but OneDrive was being uncoöperative and not letting me access my files (or rather not letting me download any files not already stored locally), either on my laptop or on the OneDrive app on my cell phone. Anyway, I did eventually manage to get the file by accessing my OneDrive account on the web, and I made the necessary updates, but... it was much more of an ordeal than it needed to be.

This is far from the first time I've had trouble with OneDrive; with disturbing frequency it just decides to stop syncing for no apparent reason and I have to reset it, which then makes it have to resync all the million-plus files I have stored there. I've said before that I'm making an effort to move toward using more open-source software and in particular away from software by companies that have embraced generative "AI", and I have since stopped using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel in favor of their LibreOffice equivalents, but OneDrive is the one part of my Microsoft Office subscription I'm still using. It's next on the chopping block, though; I just have to find a good equivalent. There's no particular hurry, because the last time I renewed my subscription I paid for a full year and it doesn't expire until October, so there's little to be gained by stopping my use of it before then... but before October I'll find some other cloud hosting service to migrate my files to, and I'm not going to renew my Office subscription. (And the next time I get a new computer, I'll look into Linux...)

Anyway, despite these unexpected roadblocks, I did get all the relevant text on the Wongery updated to reflect the new licensing terms. (At least, I think I did; it's not entirely impossible I missed something somewhere.) The one thing I haven't updated is the license icon that appears at the bottom of the page—that still just shows the logo for CC BY-SA. I'll get that updated too eventually, I suppose, but I'm not entirely sure how to go about it; I could easily enough slap together an image combining the CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC logos with a plus sign between them, but it seems to me it would be a lot more elegant to keep them as separate logos and have the footer display both... but that would probably require some hacking of the MediaWiki code, or rather I guess another custom extension. (Or does such an extension already exist? It's worth a look. Surely I'm not the first person to want to release the content of a MediaWiki wiki under multiple licenses.)

Of course, this won't be the end of the license changes. I do still want to eventually release the Wongery content as well under the currently still nonexistent Akinetic Media License, which will make it possible for anyone to make commercial use of Wongery content for books, tabletop games, and pretty much any other medium except movies and video games, without having to share their work and without having to ask us for permission and arrange special licensing terms. But that's going to have to wait till I'm in a somewhat better financial situation (which can happen; things are improving; but I'm not there yet). In the meantime, though... well, anyone who wants to license the Wongery content now has an additional option.

And now I've really got to get cracking on writing more content so there's more content to license...