As I already indicated in the previous post, after all those years I have decided to move on in various ways. It’s the year of new horizons for me.

This post is my final one on FOSS Patents. There is a possibility that others than me will maintain and contribute to this blog in the future. It will remain available as an archive for a transitional period.

I never monetized FOSS Patents. Not a single ad was sold. Not a single subscription. It started as a private, personal thing, and that’s how my involvement with it is ending now. The content wasn’t monetized either. Whenever I received serious requests for reuse, I authorized them, such as by the Library of Congress (LoC). By authorizing the LoC more than a decade ago to archive all FOSS Patents post, I already dedicated the content to the general public. And let’s face it: the kind of content that you find here is rather short-lived in practical terms, though an archive may satisfy researchers’ curiosity.

With the exception that I can’t make decisions for third parties whose material I incorporated (which is easily identifiable as such, given that I properly quoted external sources and made the sources of images clear), you can use my FOSS Patents writings under the Creative Commons BY-ND license. Beyond that, I will consider even derivative works fair use so long as they don’t create any misconceptions as to what my views really are–and what they are not.

I don’t want to make this a big thing here. I’m neither celebrating nor mourning. This is a rational and well-considered step. Times change (for instance. I’m not available for consulting work anymore). I hope you enjoyed reading my posts as much as I enjoyed writing them, and I apologize for sometimes having gone off-topic.

I’m now, starting in a few days, going to be writing a book on the Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard merger saga. I will do so in a beautiful place with excellent weather and in a quiet environment. That book project–my first one in decades–is going to essentially require my full attention until it’s done. Given that I played Activision games in the 1980s, worked for Blizzard in the 1990s, opposed and thereby delayed a merger in the late 2000s, and played Candy Crush in the 2010s, I just want to write that book. And it’s not going to be put under a Creative Commons license, by the way.

While my focus on that project will be next to 100%, I may sometimes voice my views on certain other topics elsewhere. There are many formats out there.

Once again, thanks for everything!