Re: Proposal: License Change for Manual And Standardization of Licenses for Official Docs

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

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.

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...

For #2, there are a few different scenarios I see:

a) Republish in some sort of open publication. In this case, any free
license will do--the publishers have no intention of keeping any edits
they make for themselves, and will likely give any changes they make
back to the community.

b) Republish in some sort of traditional media--book, magazine, etc. As
a professional writer for over 12 years, I think this model is dying,
but this definitely would get the best exposure outside the world of
free software. I don't think a free license helps here--in most cases,
these publishers want an exclusive license for some period of time with
the original author. There's nothing preventing sole authors of various
chapters from entering this type of agreement independently of
publishing under a free license, if they can negotiate appropriately
with the publisher. Having free documentation actually hurts negotiation
for these types of publishers.

c) Republish as internal corporate documentation, or training material.
This we definitely want, and is a good reason for choosing a free
license. We should make it easy for them to republish parts of the
document, and aggregate into other works. The main question is, should
they be able to then take their finished work to a publisher under
scenario b? I think we're all in agreement that yes, they should, as
long as LSMB gets attribution. I would further argue that a Share-Alike
provision would allow us to take areas of the documentation they edited,
clarified, improved, and put them back in our documentation making it
better--we should retain the right to do that, and not have to seek
permission from the authors of the derivative works to do so.

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.

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.


How else do you see having an unrestrictive free license on
documentation could make the software more widespread?



Cheers,

-- 
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com