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GNU Releases Free Documentation License

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-licensing dept.

Bananenrepublik writes "The GNU Project has released the GNU Free Documentation License. It is meant 'to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it [the documentation], with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.'"

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Please do not use this by Jonas+�berg · · Score: 5

    RMS just wrote in to say that there has been a few minor last-minute corrections to the license. I'm sorry that I do not have any more details at the moment, but please do not use this license just yet.

  2. It doesn't address the need by tilly · · Score: 4

    Here is the problem.

    A publisher like O'Reilly produces technical manuals, under the license an author chooses. If a would-be author (who is about to do a lot of work) wants advice on licenses, O'Reilly is stuck between a rock and a hard place, they want to support open source, but they have to admit that the author will probably make more if it is not an open source license on the book. For some reason people like writing software but find documentation a chore.

    However what seems to work very well is if O'Reilly can work with the author to produce both a book and connected documentation. An example is Programming Perl where the online documentation started life as the book rearranged (and without the bad jokes). If the online documentation is exactly the book, people act as if the book is a cheap rip-off. If there is a clear division, then they don't.

    But if you do the above, the online documentation gets maintained and the dead tree version does not. At some point you need to re-synch. But what pair of licenses allows that?

    Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses. IOW O'Reilly or anyone else can come out with clearly differentiated books, but the information contained in such has to be available as free documentation.

    But the devil is in the details...

    Cheers,
    Ben

    --
    My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
  3. Comments as a published documentation author by georgeha · · Score: 4

    Well, I just had my first documentation book published (not counting inhouse software manuals), the Samba Administrator's Handbook, ISBN 0-7645-4636-8) so I thought I'd make a few comments from an author's viewpoint.

    I'd really like to see the incentive model for writing free documentation. Programmers do free software for fun and fame. That's their compensation. Writing documentation, however, is not fun, and also doesn't give one any brownie points in the community. Writing documentation is just plain hard work. What's the compensation for that work?

    Writing is work, boring and tedious, I spent a lot of nights writing when I'd have rather been snuggling with my honey, playing with daughter, building Lego, surfing the web or even configuring my Linux boxes.

    I don't think I've gotten any brownie points in the community, though the 5 star review on Amazon was nice. I haven't gotten any book related email either, and I'm not hard to track down (the joy of having a unique last name).

    Financially I've done alright though, the advance helped me buy my house.

    Also, book writing (even large books) is still a one-person show (as opposite to software writing).

    Or a two or three person show, but I get your gist. You don't have 20 member teams writing books.

    And if the book you write is good, you can easily make some money out of it. So what is the incentive to give it away? You get credit for software by the community. As a documentation writer, no one even remembers your name in the community. So going to a traditional publisher seems a more natural way for one, in terms of money, as well as fame. And if you don't trust traditional publishers (or don't find one), you can still publish your work yourself.

    I could publish any book myself I wanted to, but the printing costs would probably astronomical (unless I used the production printers at work), the distribution costs would be astronomical, and forget getting my books to a brick and mortar bookstore, at the moment, if you want a wide audience for a dead tree book, you probably need to work with a publisher.

    Once you do work with a publisher, you can't just write any book you want to. You need to sell your concept to them, submit sample chapters, compromise on what they want to publish, it becomes more of a collaborative effort than one person blindly dumping 400 pages of Word files to the publisher.

    It was an interesting time, certainly an ego trip to see my name on Amazon, but I don't think I would do it again for free, the non-financial rewards wouldn't justify all the time and effort.

    George