Hi all, What do you people say about writing a book titled "Perl Humour" where we collect the best of the online humour about Perl? (both for, against, related to and in NPOV of Perl.) We can donate something like 50% of the proceedings to the TPF, and also eventually publish the book online.
The motivation for that idea came to me when, during dinner, my family suggested that I write some E-books for Amazon.com and similar E-book shops and sell them there (for the Kindle, etc.). Then I thought about these pages and others which contain a lot of Perl humour from the online world: * http://perl.net.au/wiki/Perl_Humour * http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/ * http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall So we can prepare an E-book of it, and possibly end up preparing a paperware version, while also eventually making the sources (in whatever format we choose) available under one of the Creative Commons licences. I volunteer to take this forward (in exchange for getting a percentage of the payment per copy), but would like to know what you people think about it. Some issues: 1. Violation of one's copyrights: we may need to ask permission from all the sources, and in the case of IRC conversations, where there are many random nicks (who are possibly not on IRC), this can be a huge problem. I think there's some amount of fair use that allows it, but IANAL. 2. Trademarks: I think the general law about trademarks is that one cannot prevent any and all use of them, just when one suspects that they may be confused with a different product which may lead to purchase fraud. So for example I can say "I think that O'Reilly Media™'s books suck due to X, Y, Z." without infringing on their trademark, but I cannot say something like "The book 'Mastering cat' by O'Reilly Media which I wrote is available for purchase on my online store.". So it shouldn't be a problem if we mention some people's trademark, and naturally, the right of parody also applies to trademarks. 3. Defamation / Misquoting - some people may object to quoting their names, nicknames or handles (I've been bitten by it a few times.). One option would be to "anonymise" them and use generic meta-syntactic names (say from the Bible, Shakespeare, the Greek Mythology, etc.) instead. We can try asking of course, because some people would want the publicity. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html Larry Wall gets the colon. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
