Why this site will not be open source?

TL;DR: I want to avoid plagiarism of my website.

As you may have noticed, this site is not open-source. Why is that so? That’s what we’ll talk about in this post.

Opinion on open-source portfolios

I’m definitely for open-source. I think that anything that can be open-source should be open-source. I prefer open-source tools over close-sourced ones. Portfolio will be one of my only projects that will not be open-source.

I want to avoid plagiarism of my website. I stand by the fact that the portfolio should be something that the programmer creates completely by himself. This will show what he can create. It doesn’t feel right to use someone else’s portfolio for my own purposes without proper attribution. I have spent a lot of time on this website and I don’t want someone to take my website and just change their name and claim it as their work.

A nice example is website by Brittany Chiang . It seems to me that absolutely everyone is copying her website. And it’s also easy when it’s open-source. I’m not saying that it’s bad that her website is open-source, quite the oposite. I think it’s wrong when people completely take the source code of someone else’s website, change the name and pass it off as their work without proper attribution (a small comment in the source code is not proper attribution).

This website is made as an template

I created this website as a Hugo template. This means that it is very easy, if you have the source code, to simply change the name and all the texts and pass it off as your work. Even someone with no programming knowledge could do it. However, this is how I think websites should be made. So that someone without programming knowledge is able to edit the content of a website such as texts, images, etc.

This website is not complex speaking of design

If you wanted and had the determination, you could make a 1:1 copy of my website. The design is very minimalistic and all you need is knowledge of HTML and CSS. This is a static website, it doesn’t even have any JavaScript. All content on this page is static.

What is quite complex about this website is the content management. It is made so that posts can be created simply by creating a single file. I can easily create the technologies that I use. But the design of this website is very simple.

Inspiration vs plagiarism

There is also the so-called inspiration. The question is what can be considered inspiration. But this is a very subjective topic, and everyone should make up their own mind about it.