[Gambas-user] Re: Gambas book

[Rob Kudla]

On Sat September 17 2005 14:00, Benoit Minisini wrote:
> I think we should choose a free (speech) licence for the
> documentation.
> Anyway, you can't copy it freely to write a proprietary book.

Yeah, I regret not changing the default TWiki notice "Copyright © 
1999-2003 by the contributing authors. All material on this 
collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors." 
to read "Copyright $currentyear by the contributing authors.  All 
material is available under a Creative Commons license 
(Attribution-ShareAlike.)  Some rights reserved." before putting up 
the wiki.  But it's too late for that now.  Maybe you could do it in 
your code for the new.gambasdoc.org wiki.

My solution so far for my own book (which I intend to publish under a 
Creative Commons license as well) has been to start creating my own 
minimal Gambas documentation from scratch, but the development 
version has changed so much in the last year that I'm essentially 
starting over again.  And I don't feel it's too much to ask of the 
authors of books on languages to write their own reference material; 
authors of VB books have had to do that all along.  It's just tedious 
work that could be better spent coming up with useful practical 
example code and the like.

If anyone would like, I can assemble a list of contributors and which 
pages they contributed to, so that people who want to seek their 
permission to include their work in other documentation projects and 
books can do so.  Maybe the dozen or so of us who have done the vast 
majority of work on the documentation would all be willing to adopt 
the Attribution-ShareAlike license for our work.

Along the same lines, I wonder if the designer of the Gambas mascot 
(Fabien?) might be willing to offer it under a Creative Commons 
license.  My writing is somewhat whimsical in tone and I hope to have 
both Tux and the Gambas mascot on the cover.

Here is my own preferred Creative Commons license (very similar in 
intent to the GPL):

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

I prefer the Creative Commons guys' licenses because I'm also a 
musician and sometimes write fiction, but for documentation they 
themselves recommend the GNU FDL (basically the GPL for 
documentation):

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

The FDL is more restrictive in that it requires you to have a 
machine-readable version of your documentation available in a 
non-proprietary format.  The terms of the license say that 
machine-generated HTML may not be acceptable, and Wiki pages are 
definitely machine-generated HTML, so I don't know whether we could 
really use that.

Rob