Still workin' on it...
The site program is what I call the as-yet-unnamed collection of PHP scripts which run this site.
See the developer's notes and site program documentation for more information.
See also the site program documentation.
Yes. The site program as released here is free software*. You can use this PHP to run your own site, take snippets of code for your own project, study it, modify it, change it in any way you want, as long as you don't lie about who made what. This means, don't try to claim that you made my stuff or that I made your stuff. I don't expect disclaimers or citations everywhere; just tell the truth when asked and we're cool. If you do lie about who made what, and I find out about it, then we are not cool. (Whether I find out or not depends in part on how much you take and how much you change it. If the code is so highly mutated or insignificant that I can't tell it was originally mine, then you're off the hook.)
Things will get a bit more serious if there's money involved. I chose to give this code away for free, so don't try to just take my code and try to sell it without having made your own changes. That's just being a jerk. So if you mirror these exact zip files and charge to download them, that's bad. If you just change some spaces somewhere, or alter a configuration setting, or rename a local variable, and try to sell that, that's also not OK. But if you change the code in a functional way, this restriction is lifted - I'm okay with you selling that, as you have produced something valuable beyond what I made.
I have coined the term "honestware" to describe this kind of license, which while extremely permissive, does not equate to a full release to the public domain. Other countries' copyright laws, per the Berne convention, will recognize an author's "moral rights" which basically cover the same ideas as outlined above. (My country, the U.S.A, does not in general recognize moral rights, which is why I have to do it in this convoluted way.)
I'm a believer in free culture. I'm not a fan of the status quo of U.S. copyright law; more specifically, I believe that it is too restrictive regarding appropriation and derivative works. I believe that human creativity is by definition a process of deriving, mixing, and remixing: from the moment we're born, we take in ideas from the world around us, including the creative output of other people, which are then imprinted as neural connections in our brains. In the process of creating, we draw on those ideas, combining them with our own to produce a new creative work. I believe generally that everyone should be free to build on the culture they are exposed to throughout their lives. To insist otherwise is to immorally stifle the human creative instinct.
*The term "free software" is often used in conjunction with a certain Foundation and a certain General Public License. Lest this term confuse or emotionally arouse the more socially-inclined reading this, I feel it important to justify and make explicit my generalized usage. It's in part for the reasons outlined above that I'm attracted to the idea of free software. However, it's also for these reasons that I'm not particularly inclined to use the GPL or a similar strict copyleft license. In particular, I disagree ideologically with the FSF on matters of linking. The issue of "GPL compatibility" is well-known in open-source culture: you're not allowed to mix GPL software with non-GPL-compatible software. I see that state of affairs as a problem for the above reasons.