On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 8:04 PM, David Joyner <wdjoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Jason Grout
> <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote:
>> I'm posting this to (1) share what I've learned by reading a lot over
>> the last little while, and (2) ask for advice from people that have
>> thought a lot about licensing of books and notes.
>>
>> I'm looking at different licenses for a Sage-enhanced set of notes, in
>> the spirit of the CCLI grant proposal that was posted here a few days
>> ago (please go read it and make comments! [1] :).  I see these notes as
>> incorporating Sage code in examples, like you see in William's number
>> theory book or other tutorials that we've seen in various places.
>>
>> I've spent a while reading up on licenses, and it seems that there are
>> three good possibilities for an "open" license that would allow others
>> to make modifications and freely redistribute the result:
>>
>> 1. GNU Free Documentation License 1.3
>> 2. Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
>> 3. plain old GPL
>>
>> GFDL and CC-by-sa are not compatible with GPL, so if I wanted the notes
>> to be distributed with Sage (so the examples turn into doctests, etc.),
>> if I went with (1) or (2), I'd have to dual-license the notes with GPL.
>
>
> Can you explain why this is the case? If I wrote notes which retained all
> copyrights *except* distribution, and allowed unlimited free
> distribution, why would that
> *prevent* them from being distributed with a GPL program? By notes I mean
> text without code which is statically linked to Sage code.

It wouldn't.  The program isn't linking in the notes as a library.

> Of course, it is another issue entirely whether or not William or
> other developers
> would want/allow material which is not open source to be distributed with 
> Sage.
> It seems clear to me that GFDL and cc-by-sa are open source though, so that
> is not the issue.

I agree.

Anyway -- Jason thanks for starting this thread and bringing up these
questions.  We haven't discussed them much on sage-devel in quite a
while, and discussing them is helpful to raise awareness.  They are
very confusing.

William

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