David Crossley wrote:
Ferdinand Soethe wrote:
David Crossley wrote:
If you tell the list what your general aim is then
we can see what any legal issues might be. We can also
seek help from the Apache "legal-discuss" mailing list.
It is actually quite simple to describe:
I want to donate the concept for the English language version of our
book to Apache while keeping all the rights for the German version to
avoid any conflicts or problems with my publishers.
The (potential) problem is that in the publishing world you can
license the right to publish different language versions separately
(e.g. to different publishers) but I'm not sure if that works with the
Apache license.
I am not going to attempt to interpret the Contributor License
Agreement (CLA) for this case, as i still don't know the facts
nor what it is that you would actually be contributing.
Also IANAL so it would be misleading for me to say anything.
I suggest that the best way forward is for you and Ross to
present a clear case to the ASF Legal Discussion mailing list.
http://www.apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html#foundation-legal
Actually, in my opinion there is no conflict or discussion. Certainly I
do not consider that there is any financial value in my small
contribution to this "concept" that Ferdinand is trying to assign the
rights to. I am thoroughly confused by the discussion and can only
assume that it is a potential issue with the German publishers.
What Ferdinand is proposing to donate to Forrest is just the outline of
a book. About half of this book is of no interest to a documentation
effort within Forrest and I doubt we, as a community would develop those
chapters, we would rip them out as not relevant (e.g. history of
WYSIWYG, why WYSIWYG is no good for many jobs, alternatives to WYSIWYG,
XML basics, XSLT basics that kind of thing).
If we strip out all these chapters what is left is an outline for a few
chapters documenting how to work with Forrest. I stress *outline* there
is nothing, in my opinion, of any intellectual value in this document,
only a structure for a set of documentation files for Forrest. In other
words, something that, if we were to look back through our archives,
would have existed *before* the chapter outlines were written.
In my opinion what should happen is that the relevant chapter outline
should be ripped out of the proposal and put into SVN as XHTML documents
that we can point to via an URL to SVN. With our recent influx of offers
for help on beginner documentation this would provide a starting
framework for work to begin.
However, Ferdinand, I am not a lawyer, if you are concerned about your
German publishers response to this then you should discuss it with them.
Once you have a clear response from them then ask the relevant questions
in the ASF Legal Discussion mailing list as David suggests.
Ross
