Steve announced today that he is releasing all of his material except his book into the public domain. This is quite shocking, because people can take credit for his work and make money off it with no royalties to him if his work is public domain. Most of the publications of the U.S. government are in the public domain, so Steve’s work is on this level now.
I have to say this sounds like a very positive and generous decision. The most liberal license I release my work under is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License for my photography, but I never considered making my work public domain because of the total and irrevocable loss of ownership. Perhaps Steve knows something I don’t?
Anyway, he’s already added a request for PayPal donations to the bottom of all his blog posts, so this may result in a net increase to his income if many people donate.
Good work Steve!
I found this very interesting and I do think it will be a very good thing for a lot of people. It did get me thinking about possible reasons he is doing this though.
What I came up with:
1. Steve is really tapped in to an “abundance mindset” and has trust that he’ll be ok for income, even though he’s allowing others to do (more or less) any they want with the content that has made him his money.
2. Steve has a fear of success, what he’s achieved so far is out of his comfort zone, and he is sabotaging things.
Was reading his forum to see what he said about his decision and somebody questioned, very nicely, that perhaps that was something more to his decision and asked specifically if it had anything to do with his divorce (which is apparently still in process). Nevada is apparently a “community property” state, so if there isn’t any property, there is nothing for Erin to take.
Steve responded in a jerky way and then banned the guy!
I think Steve is a fascinating guy. Wish that he’d be open enough to take a little criticism and question. That would allow us into his mind more than any article he’s written.
Wow, I didn’t think that he could be trying to disenfranchise Erin. Very interesting! He does ban people from the forum too easily, but I don’t think he has a fear of success… he’s pretty successful already.
His immediate jerky response is proof that this was exactly his intention.
And BTW – this won’t make me popular with the male posters here, but I feel Erin’s entitled, at this point, to anything that she can get.
I think the divorce is long over, so it’s probably too late now.
And given she was married to a very charismatic, manipulative man, she probably agreed to whatever terms he offered.
Yeah, he wasn’t well-known when they got married but he probably got everything he wanted in the divorce.