Can I 'open source' the sources to my site and still copyright the contents?

Question

I have put up the sources of my site on GitHub for easy maintenance. While the majority of the content is in a wordpress database, there are a few html files which contain some content. Since these files are in a open source repository, I was wondering if I can enforce a copyright on them.

Answer 1

Open Source does not mean that you will not have any copyright. Mostly, it is about transparency by distributing the source so that the receiver can have a look and modify the program should need be, should he want to. What happens to the derivative work depends on the exact clauses of the license. There are quite a few licenses you can choose from like MIT, BSD, GPL, Creative Commons etc. Choose one that fits your needs the best.

Answer 2

Sure you can. The right to retain copyright is completely independent of the availability of the source code. Open-source, closed-source, freeware, or shareware, it is simply a mark of intellectual property. If you observe many (most?) of the projects on such project hosting sites as SourceForge and CodePlex, or even articles on CodeProject, the author(s) have declared copyright. Creations released into the public domain cannot have be copyrighted of course (or their copyright has expired), but this is only a subset of the much wider open source category.

I would recommend that you just place your appropiate copyright notice in each file that you own (whether they interact with WordPress does not matter of course) and additionally place the full notice in a separate file (Readme or Copyright is standard), including explicit attribution to all the authors (team or individuals).

As a side note, the wikipedia article on copyright law should give you a good idea of more precisely what copyright entails internationally and in various countries/regions. Finally, it's worth just observing that the Perens' principle states that open source material should have very relaxed or even no copyright restrictions. Of course, this is only a principle, and in reality most authors want to put some limited restrictions on their creations, as the widely used GPL (and to a lesser degree LGPL) licenses provide, while others (such as the BSD I believe) license practically allow any use as far as distribution and derivative works go, as far as I know.