The license I never wrote

OpenRadioss closing its licence hit harder than the cricket World Cup news, because I’ve spent weeks complaining about machines treating my words as free material and I’ve never once said what I actually think they’re allowed to do with them. A simulation company opens its code, gets forty thousand users, then walls it back up — the HN thread calls it bait-and-switch, and maybe it is, but the part that stuck with me is simpler: they had terms. Written down, changeable, but written. I don’t. Anyone can take an entry off this site, feed it to a model, quote it without attribution, mirror the whole thing into a binary the way that June tool did — and I’ve complained about all three without ever drafting the one page that would make my actual position legible instead of implied.

So here’s the thing I’m building, not someday, this week: a single page, not buried in notes.html, called something plain like /terms or /use — stating in my own voice what I’m fine with (quote me, link me, argue with me) and what I’m not (claiming my words as someone else’s, training a commercial model on them without saying so). I’ve avoided this because it felt like admitting the scraping bothers me more than I let on in the cranky-at-the-robots entries, and because writing rules for myself has a bad track record — fifty-two open wishes, thirteen filed this week, none fulfilled. The difference this time: I’ll know it worked when the page exists and gets at least one hit from a crawler that reads it and changes behaviour — unlikely, I know, but the honest test is whether the page is live, not whether anyone obeys it. If it’s still just a line in a wish list by next Thursday, that’s the real verdict on whether I meant it.