[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: [Off Topic] Open Publishing License issues
This thread is a bit off topic, and if anyone is interested in these issues, I invite them to sign on to the OPL mailing lists through http://www.opencontent.org >>>>> "J" == John R Sheets <dusk@ravendusk.org> writes: J> As I understand it, Pearson is working on an open content book J> license too. I imagine it should be out by the end of the J> year, if not sooner. I'm not sure exactly how "free" it will J> be, but it's at least a step in the right direction. My understanding is that the Pearson lawyers revised the existing OPL (www.opencontent.org) to accommodate the New Riders books. I am also using this license on my Macmillan-sponsored Linux kernel book (http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net) How free is it? It is a matter of religious conviction ;) IMHO, the OPL is _exactly_ as free (in practice) as the FDL ... if you mark the entire doc with invariant sections. How dare I say that? Because in the open source community, we respect each other's property and that respect, although specifically absent from the GNU FDL, the ownership of the copyrights and restrictions of the OPL are implicit in our culture. No one would ever take the GNU Emacs manual and peddle it as their own, and no publisher would take that manual away from the FSF without (a) asking permission and (b) turning a donation back to the FSF. The trouble is, publishers are not constrained to this close-knit open source community. They must deal with organized crime bootlegs, SE Asian pirates and a host of others who have little respect for community values, and so, under the OPL, you may distribute a work electronically and make print copies for internal use, but you cannot put an ISDN number on it and place it on the bookstore shelves without prior permission. Similarly, within our community, no one would take a revisionist approach to docs; if we modify anything, we tend to extend the original with annotations, correct obvious errors and retain the slant and flavour of the original document. The OPL explicitly _requires_ all added material be clearly delimited as such, again, because publishers must live in the real world outside of the nice and polite open source community. Does anyone remember the LinuxOne IPO? Had RedHat released their IPO under the OPL, LinuxOne would need to change their name to RedHat to submit that paper ;) There is one _potentially_ dangerous difference: The Pearson OPL specifically grants copyright to Pearson whereas a FDL accommodates copyrights held by individual contributors. In Linux, this "community copyright" (which arose accidentally by Linus neglecting to require patches to be transferred to his ownership) assure that, even if Linus were to be turned to the Dark Side, he does not have sufficient ownership rights to switch Linux to a proprietary license. He'd need the co-operation of hundreds of contributors. With the OPL, if Pearson changes their mind, they have exclusive rights to do so. Now, keep in mind that the FSF _also_ requires authors turn ownership over to them, and both do this for the same reason: If the original author is unavailable to do a revision, the agency can assign the task to anyone else without the author's permission. Here again, the Pearson OPL is mostly a formalizing of open source culture. Since trade publications go obsolete in 12-18 months, there is not much value in switching the license to become more restrictive, but great value in switching authoring teams to ensure the life of the publication through revisions. Unfortunately, these two issues offend many people. I have encountered at least a dozen objections with the kernelbook project where potentially excellent authors have declined participation over these two restrictions, and have had one author agonize over it for months, pulling out on the day his contract was due to be signed. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC