Creative Commons is an organization dedicated to ensuring the free exchange and flow of culture by providing ease to understand and use licenses by which creators (such as you and me) can release their works. 
Creators can choose to make their work freely available for any kind of use by anyone, or they can limit that use so that it must give them credit (attribution), and/or may only be used for non-commercial purposes.
On general principle, I put most of my posted work on the web – including this site – under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license. I’m quite happy to say that people all over the world have found my work useful for their own projects. My photos help illustrate wikipedia entries, university programs, and news stories. All because the CC licenses made it clear and easy for others to understand that I wished them to be used for those purposes.
Occasionally, however, I’ve had some problems with others understanding the concept of “non-commercial”. It’s not a big deal to me in terms of dashing my own hopes for commercial sales, and the exact definition of non-commercial is certainly unclear. It does bother me greatly, however to see a business abusing the ambiguity of the CC non-commercial license clause. That’s why I’m happy to see that the folks at Creative Commons are working on clarifying that issue. Part of that work is surveying creators and users on exactly what *they* think non-commercial use is. If you’re still reading, you should jump over and take the survey. It’s for the common good.
unacoder
is there a license for ‘do what you want; i don’t care; just don’t blame me’?
MB
Sure just dedicate it to the public domain.
unacoder
that seems about right. unfortunately, it’s not an option available to me at code.google.com. i’ve selected what i think is the least restrictive: the MIT license.