[Kdeev-books] Allocation of tasks

[Jan Schumacher]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thursday 04 September 2003 22:02, Ralf Nolden wrote:
> On Donnerstag, 4. September 2003 14:50, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > As a heads up to the list members, I recently submitted a proposal to
> > O'Reilly books about writing a Qt Cookbook, to which I was told that they
> > currently aren't interested in books about free desktops as they don't
> > sell well (in their perspective).
>
> That's the reason I want to start this as a community project because the
> newbie developers will be thankful for those manuals, printed or not.

Great! An electronic book is much more helpful compared to none, than a 
printed book is to an electronic one. For any copyleft book, the only value a 
publisher can add, is marketing, printing and distribution, as they can't 
control further publishing. If they don't believe that they will make money 
from their customers for these services, then they're either wrong, or their 
customers are not willing to pay for these priviliges in the first place.

> However, on the licensing issue I think that currently we should only stick
> to the FDL as a license without any exclusives or optionals.

I am afraid I still do not understand why you would like to use the FDL, 
particularly if you do not want to use cover texts or invariant sections. 
Don't get me wrong, I like neither and would hope that the books were without 
any of these. However, the FDL was created because of them. If you do not 
want any, but do want the FSF type freedoms, go for the GPL. To a publisher, 
the choice between FDL and GPL is irrelevant, because they cannot control 
further publishing with either of them.  Note that just because you do not 
define invariant sections in a document, that does not keep anyone else from 
doing that. Unless you are prepared to add any and all invariant sections and 
covers from other sources, you will not be able to merge changes back from 
all sources. In fact if some company were to print such a book it would make 
a lot of sense for them to add some invarant advertising for themselves. All 
useful editing by them is then essentially lost. In fact, the example given 
by the FSF on cover texts [1] is something you probably would not want to 
have in the official tree.

> I hope that is ok for anyone and we can close the licensing discussion
> (continue if there's still open questions though).

There are a couple that I believe are still worth considering:
What does the FDL offer, that the GPL does not, given invariants are not 
wanted?
Is that worth the restrictions in users freedom?
... potential difficulties in incorporating other people's contributions.
... the GPL incompatibility meaning dual licenses for code examples, no code 
examples from the KDE code base without all authors agreeing to relicense 
their code under a license incompatible to the licenses accepted for code in 
KDE and not being allowed to incorporate bits from the Qt-Reference?
... the waver of individual author's copyright to allow for relicensing under 
the GPL in case the FDL turns out to be suboptimal for the project?
... the problematic no-technical-measures-to-obstruct-reading-condition?

Regards
Jan

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto-opt.html

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/V/IA4cR0MEP0sUQRAqSSAKCAPJmrPsdmn/5AGWdT4gGw8bYWVACfVzU5
pwQLCOdZkWR+BnByGrC744o=
=echS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----