--- michael dolan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does anyone know of any sites that have a lot of
> links to various books 
> published with the GNU Free Documentation License
> (the GPL for books)?

All I could find of interest was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL. My suspicion is
that there are not a lot of books out there licensed
under the GFDL.

> Does anyone know of any books (besides Free as in
> Freedom the Richard 
> Stallman biography) published this way?

I thought "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory
Doctorow was GFDL, but I can't find any license for
it.

> Does the GFDL cover man pages, or is that an
> extension of the GPL?

Again, no definitive answer but I did find
http://lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2003/debian-gcc-200305/msg00438.html.

> I know O'Reilly is now using a modified copyright
> for their books (it 
> lasts for 17 years only I believe), but does anyone
> else know of any 
> authors or publishers using alternative copyrights?
> What do ya'll think of the GFDL?

My first thought is that it is a good idea because
information is shared. But then again I haven't
licensed anything I've written under the GFDL. After
you posed the question, I've found a few criticisms of
the GFDL in that it proposes something called
"invariant sections" which is seen as limiting
freedom.

>  Do you think books
> are so 
> fundamentally different from code that it doesn't
> work?

Define "work". If by "work" you mean getting the
information in as many hands (heads?) as possible, the
GFDL could be argued to "work". If you mean make the
maximum amount of $ possible for something written,
then other factors must be considered.

Responding to your question has caused me to realize
that the GFDL might not "work" ;), as books and code
are very different. Would have to know more about the
GFDL.

> Thanks for any info or opinions you could give me.

Great questions! Gives me something new to research.

=====
John Hebert
'cat /dev/random | perl'

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

Reply via email to