Yeah. As it says on the bottom, "Copyright 2011 Richard Stallman released under Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0 unported".
It's a surprising statement for many reasons. First, I have traditionally thought of CC as somehow opposed to GNU, but here's Stallman releasing with CC. Second, it's a 2011 document -- had he not been to a doctor prior to 2011? unlikely, so maybe he just never noticed what he was signing?
Perhaps the most surprising thing is the "noderivs" part. One important text -- the GPL -- is also released as copyrighted, to discourage people from modifying the GPL in their COPYING documents in their repositories. But CC Noderivs prohibits any modification of this little snippet. I thought the whole point of free software was modifiability -- but Stallman doesn't think that this applies to free art? Meanwhile, it is not released as share-alike, which is the CC license which "copylefts" the work in the way that the GNU GPL acts to copyleft software.
Stallman's mentioned at various times that he doesn't think modifiability is nearly as important for expressive type works. He has a very user-centric view on why software (and hardware) should be free, basically that users should be able to modify their own devices and share the modifications, or at least pay someone to make the modifications for them, as part of the right to fully use/customize/control your own computational environment.
Being able to modify and distribute copies of Stallman's 2011 narrative account of a doctor's visit doesn't seem (to me, at least) to implicate a similar right-to-your-own-devices rationale. Reuse in the artistic domain is more of a "remix culture" type of thing, which I think Stallman is sympathetic to, but it's not his core interest.
I suppose people tend to think of rms as an idea more than a person, almost -- someone who adheres to a small set of principles with complete disregard for practicality or anything else.
It's not true, though -- and this shouldn't be surprising. A short blog post is not at all the same as software, and so it's pretty normal that he'd treat it differently.
One obvious reason -- to get his views out, and to gain respect from people who don't know him, it helps for them to encounter him making intelligent comments on related issues. If he lets others republish his posts and essays (statements of opinion, mind you, not software or documentation) without attribution and/or edited, he loses that chance with no gain in exchange.
I think there's a fundamental difference, too. His books are fiction. (Or fact. I dunno, I didn't read them.) His blog posts are his personal opinion. I would definitely treat their contents differently.
The noderivs clause is similar to the case of invariant sections in the GFDL. Stallman is quite consistent in considering that his writings do not need to be free.
It's a surprising statement for many reasons. First, I have traditionally thought of CC as somehow opposed to GNU, but here's Stallman releasing with CC. Second, it's a 2011 document -- had he not been to a doctor prior to 2011? unlikely, so maybe he just never noticed what he was signing?
Perhaps the most surprising thing is the "noderivs" part. One important text -- the GPL -- is also released as copyrighted, to discourage people from modifying the GPL in their COPYING documents in their repositories. But CC Noderivs prohibits any modification of this little snippet. I thought the whole point of free software was modifiability -- but Stallman doesn't think that this applies to free art? Meanwhile, it is not released as share-alike, which is the CC license which "copylefts" the work in the way that the GNU GPL acts to copyleft software.