Hi, Chris Travers wrote: > > Part of the question is how do we: > 1) Encourage contributions to documentation and > 2) Leverage that documentation to make the software more widespread. > > I don't see how a license can do either of these.
For #1, I think the critical thing is to make it simple to do so. People will contribute if it's easy, if there's a clear, simple way of accepting contributions. A BSD-style license may actually discourage some contributions--I think people will happily contribute to help the project grow, but if they think someone else may take the fruits of their labor, close it up and make money off of it, this might prevent them from sharing. Especially newer community members who may still over-value intellectual property... For #2, there are a few different scenarios I see: a) Republish in some sort of open publication. In this case, any free license will do--the publishers have no intention of keeping any edits they make for themselves, and will likely give any changes they make back to the community. b) Republish in some sort of traditional media--book, magazine, etc. As a professional writer for over 12 years, I think this model is dying, but this definitely would get the best exposure outside the world of free software. I don't think a free license helps here--in most cases, these publishers want an exclusive license for some period of time with the original author. There's nothing preventing sole authors of various chapters from entering this type of agreement independently of publishing under a free license, if they can negotiate appropriately with the publisher. Having free documentation actually hurts negotiation for these types of publishers. c) Republish as internal corporate documentation, or training material. This we definitely want, and is a good reason for choosing a free license. We should make it easy for them to republish parts of the document, and aggregate into other works. The main question is, should they be able to then take their finished work to a publisher under scenario b? I think we're all in agreement that yes, they should, as long as LSMB gets attribution. I would further argue that a Share-Alike provision would allow us to take areas of the documentation they edited, clarified, improved, and put them back in our documentation making it better--we should retain the right to do that, and not have to seek permission from the authors of the derivative works to do so. If someone takes LSMB documentation, adds a concrete example to illustrate how to use that feature, we should be able to insist on including that back into our documentation--that's the bargain of free software. To cover scenario b, it might be worth having a single entity that owns the copyright, and have contributors assign copyright to that entity. That way other licensing agreements could be arranged, in addition to the free license. How else do you see having an unrestrictive free license on documentation could make the software more widespread? Cheers, -- John Locke "Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems" published by Charles River Media, June 2004 http://www.freelock.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
