Field note · May 12, 2026
Somebody translated the course into Portuguese
What an open licence actually buys, and what we are doing about it.
A reader translated the foundations and SQL modules into Brazilian Portuguese and put them on their own site. They told us afterwards, as a courtesy. They did not need permission, which was the entire point of choosing CC BY 4.0.
This is the first time the licence has done something we could not have done ourselves, and it has clarified a few things.
We are linking to translations, not hosting them. Hosting means owning correctness in a language none of us reads, and a stale translation under our domain is worse than a current one under someone else's.
We have started writing with translation in mind, a little. Fewer idioms, fewer jokes that depend on English phrasing. Not at the cost of the voice — the writing is meant to sound like people rather than a manual — but where a sentence can be plainer for free, it now is.
The datasets translate for free, because they are numbers and column names. That was accidental and it turns out to matter: a translated lesson still points at exactly the same file with exactly the same row 4,112.
Two other things have happened that we only found out about incidentally. A company put the pipelines module in their data onboarding. Somebody forked the site generator to make a course about a completely different subject, kept the CSS, and changed everything else. Both are entirely allowed and neither required a conversation.
If you are deciding on a licence for something you are giving away: the permissive one is what lets it become bigger than your capacity to maintain it. That is the feature.