John, Thanks for all that info.
All, I am looking for a web app that allows basic versioning, rating, etc. Any ideas? Thanks, Ryan -------------------------------------- Ryan McCain Northrop Grumman Corporation Linux System Administrator 3 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 225.219.0556 Fax: 225.219.0540 Registered Linux User #364609 >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/14/05 1:51 PM >>> Ryan, First, let me say that opensourcepresentations.org is a great idea, and one that is sorely needed. Concerning how the site should be architected; you may want to take a look at how tldp.org is laid out. Also, I recommend using one of the forum/CMS webapps as a base for your site, as it has lots of tools on it you might need, like forums, file downloads/uploads, account management, etc. Here's a good place to start browsing for what is out there: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=forum§ion=projects&Go.x=0&Go.y=0 Second, I agree with Joey Kelly's point that authors will not want to give up their copyright on original works. You may not realize it, but when authors release a work under the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL), they do not necessarily give up their copyright: from the GNU FDL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html#SEC4): To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page: Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. What the GNU FDL does is give an author a set of licensing terms specifying that readers _can_ immediately copy and derive further works from the original, _provided_ those derived works are also licensed under the GNU FDL. This required provision is a major source of debate ("GPL vs. BSD") concerning what freedom really means, but ultimately the decision is up to the author of the work. The original intent of copyright was to give the public the right to copy written works after 15(?) years, but of course now the meaning of copyright has been morphed way beyond the original intent (75 years beyond the life of the author, I think is the current definition of copyright). I can understand how you would want to retain control of the copyright with only good intentions; to ensure fair use, etc. But I think most authors would prefer to retain control of the copyright, even those who license their work under the GNU FDL. If you take a look at the HOWTOS, you will see that most of them are licensed under the GNU FDL, but the copyright belongs to the author of the document. You could _offer_ the option of letting contributors give opensourcepresentations.org the copyright for presentations. You might also want to offer contributors the capability of licensing their works under one of the Creative Commons license, which embraces the concept of open source while offering more choices than the FSF does: http://creativecommons.org/ Finally, you may want to offer some resources to authors for creating presentations. I'm currently fascinated with http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ for creating lite-weight Flash based presentations. Wink would be great for showing newbies how to do various tasks on the Linux desktop that they may not be familiar with. I can easily imagine lots of other uses. John __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
