> On Dec 7, 2017, at 3:26 PM, Joel Dueck <[email protected]> wrote: > > For any serious work, though, I am wondering how this approach would really > shake out. When “the book is a program”, is it ever a) useful or b) legally > meaningful to license the prose and the code separately when they are > interwoven and distributed together?
I can't give anyone legal advice. For myself it's a question of how can I make the material useful to its intended audience. Code becomes more valuable when it can be copied and futzed with in a compiler. Whereas ordinary prose can already be futzed with in the mind. So IMO a permissive license has less incremental benefit. I did a similar split-license idea with the pollen-tfl sample project. Some is open source and some not. [1] Nothing bad has happened. I considered enforcing this more strictly by splitting the open-source material into a `pollen-tfl-lib` package that was held in a public repo, and then a separate private repo with the other stuff. But that seemed complicated. It's partly a Pollen recruiting tool. So it should be as easy & complete as possible. OTOH I haven't released the Pollen source code for Beautiful Racket. I don't think it has much explanatory value beyond the Pollen docs & pollen-tfl. Plus, there's always work to make source code clean enough to be worth sharing. Earlier in my career I was surrounded by piracy-obsessed sasquatches. Later, by free-culture zealots. Ultimately I think both miss the point. The only way to completely protect work is to not release it. At which point the revenue potential is $0. OTOH if you make everything free, the potential also goes to $0. Therefore, somewhere in between is the optimal level of freedom (or piracy if you prefer). [1] https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen-tfl <https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen-tfl> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pollen" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
