On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:07 PM, Dan Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Sally! > > On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Sally Fortin <[email protected]> wrote: >> Friends and Colleagues, >> >> Many in the Evergreen community have expressed a desire for more >> documentation describing new features in Evergreen. Others have requested >> that those who write documentation produce it in more formats, including >> asciidoc. ESI trainers and developers have been thinking about how to help >> the Evergreen community meet its documentation needs and, to that end, are >> making some changes to the way that we produce documentation. >> >> In every new development contract, the cost is inclusive of basic end user >> documentation, written by our trainers, that will be released to the >> Evergreen community. If possible, we will release documentation in advance >> of the scheduled software release. We will publish the documentation on the >> ESI website in both asciidoc and HTML formats to make new documentation >> accessible to the community. Community members or DIG members can adapt the >> documentation to community or local needs in accordance with the CC-BY-NC-SA >> license that is listed on each document. Finally, we'll make an >> announcement to the community every time new documentation is available for >> download. You can also check our blog or website for updates on >> documentation. > > This sounds really great, but I have to note that the NC > ("Non-commercial") clause is problematic. It is in some measure > incompatible with CC-BY-SA; it restricts the use of the documentation > significantly such that the DIG would probably not be able to > integrate the Equinox contributions as no commercial use of the > Evergreen documentation would be allowed - and the definition of what > commericial use is is very fuzzy. > > For example, if a different company that offers Evergreen support > distributes a copy of the Evergreen docs as part of their Evergreen > support package, that could easily be defined as "commercial use"; or > training documentation derived from the Evergreen docs could be > defined as "commercial use". > > Hopefully this is just an oversight and the real intention is to > release the Equinox-derived documentation under the CC-BY-SA license.
It's not an oversight. We can, certainly, grant a differently flavored license to the DIG (well, the foundation, I guess) specifically, or provide explicit clarification on points of concern regarding commercial use, if that's the only way DIG will be able to make use of the documentation we produce. But unless a licensing exception is requested (and, really, all it takes is an email explaining why) we'll be defaulting to the less BSD-like -NC license. -- Mike Rylander | Director of Research and Development | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://www.esilibrary.com _______________________________________________ OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION mailing list [email protected] http://list.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-documentation
