A terrific interview with Parker Higgins dropped last week at Beyond Wordplay, and while there were many good bits, this little sentence stood out the most to me:
A funny gap is that no one really talks about the license under which blog puzzles are released.
This really got to me, as I am a firm believer in the open-source movement, yet it never occurred to me, even for a second, to think about the license of my blog puzzles. Well, that ends now. All future puzzles released on this site will be released under the MIT License [EDIT: see below], which means you are allowed to basically do whatever you want with these puzzles, as long as you retain the copyright notice. So go ahead and post them on your site, make remixed versions of them, even sell them as part of puzzle packs. I would of course appreciate a heads-up if you’re going to do something like that, but it’s not necessary. Just include the copyright and author as-is and you’re good.
Here’s a potential complication with this model: LitSoft has some pretty clear thoughts about what you can and cannot do with .puz files. Can you release something under a permissive license if another entity is claiming a more restrictive license on the file? I don’t know, and I’m not going to find out, so we will not be releasing .puz files any more on this site. Luckily, there are plenty of excellent solving options for JPZs, including our own solver, squares.io (especially great for solving with a friend!) or Xword (all the features of Across Lite and more!)
No such complications with today’s puzzle, though, as .puz files can’t handle acrostics anyway. Check it out in our solver or in Xword (squares doesn’t do acrostics … yet) and let us know what you think!
EDIT: The CC BY 4.0 license makes more sense here, as the puzzles are not software, so I’ll be using that license instead. They are functionally the same; you can still do basically whatever you want with the puzzles as long as you keep the attribution.