On 10/23/07, John Locke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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. >
Obviously licensing is only part of the solution to encouraging contributions. Part of this means ensuring that it reaches a large number of users. For example, if the manual was removed from Debian Main, that might be a bad thing :-). > 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... I would note that we are both authors of works we have at least hoped to get printed (you have your book printed, and I am still in the final editing stages of a book on a non-IT subject). I don't know to what extent you had to get permission for material used in your book, but I have been through that process for mine (and sources said yes, while others said no). If you, as an author, wanted to include some GPL'd documentation in your book, you could do this by including it in an appendix, verbatim, and ensuring that it was reasonably independant of the rest of your work. Then when the publisher asks you for permission to use this, you can provide the GPL as that permission without denying them exclusive rights to your own work. This would appear to me to be allowed as mere aggregation under that license (which would of course also need to be reproduced in another appendix). > > For #2, there are a few different scenarios I see: I am thinking more d) Create new work incorporating some material from the official documentation, but in a new form. I personally don't think that publishers would be interested in anything else. And that would be prevented by the GPL but allowed in a BSD-tyle license. And it doesn't dilute our position to basically sell printed copies of the official copies of the printed documentation. > 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. Sure. That would be something that we would like. However, note that *practical* ideas are not copyright-worthy, so one could create a similar example safely, I would think (same issue with the fact that you can copy generally recipes from cookbooks without fear of copyright infringement). At least this is true in any country, like the US or Canada, which uses an originality standard. > > 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. That would be required for the scenario I listed as well. However, I am not sure what is really gained in this case. Of course if this were the only change, it might not be sufficient to be copyrightable on its own. A collection of such examples, however, could be included in a separate portion of such a publication without violating the GPL. For example, suppose instead, I create a book called "A LedgerSMB Workbook." Part 1 is a set of lessons with hypothetical examples in an instruction-oriented order. Section 1 includes footnotes to relevant portions of section 2. Part 2 is the official docs included verbatim with appropriate copyright notices Appendix A is the GPL with a note that it only applies to section 2. You give the publisher exclusive rights to section 1. This seems to me to be allowed as mere aggregation under the GPL. Now, nothing prevents us from coming up with similar examples and including them inline in the documentation. > How else do you see having an unrestrictive free license on > documentation could make the software more widespread? > Bt allowing independent documentation to be published which uses elements of the original documentation but also sufficient originality to be published in traditional media. I am not sure what we get out of share alike licenses provided that collected/compliled works are not restricted. Best Wishes, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
