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Tackling Open-Source Book Projects?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-a-book-by-its-horns dept.

Wheeler asks: "I am currently writing a book ('The Directory Services Cookbook', shameless self-plug), which I plan to publish under some form of open license, once it's finished. At this point I am really looking for clues on which license would be appropriate for your classic, not-necessary-digital work of creation. And while we're at it: Can other OS book projects share experience on how to tackle the process of writing in general. I personally think a little Linus T. should be in every project doing editing, checking for style and layout, the works. Any comments?"

19 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. A great site for open source books by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    linuxdocs.org also, there are plenty of normal books thrown all around on the internet...all you have to do is search

    1. Re:A great site for open source books by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      Except that this site is a bare mirror of the real linuxdoc site, linuxdoc.org. Otherwise known as the LDP.


      If you are going to mirror, at least give credit where credit is due.

  2. Put all the content in Wikipedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    Use the Wikipedia license.

    Many people create valuable content and then insist on hosting or publishing the content themselves.

    Instead consider contributing your content to a public content repository like Wikipedia.

    This allows other people to easily contribute to and update your work, even if you lose interest or something happens to you. Additionally, your work will be redundantly stored and likely accessible for the far future.

    1. Re:Put all the content in Wikipedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      A couple of points (from a Wikipedian):

      1. Wikipedia currently uses the GNU Free Documentation License; we didn't formulate our own.

      2. Wikipedia isn't a general content repository, but an encyclopedia project. The project welcomes articles on all topics under the sun, but entire books aren't our mandate.

      That being said, anyone can set up a wiki and develop any type of content. All you need is a webserver and some software. Wikipedia uses UseModWiki, which is written in Perl and is under the GPL. --Stephen Gilbert

  3. Re:Hmm by J'raxis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Theres the GFDL, a GPL variant for documentation, that might be useful.

    --
    Liberty in your lifetime
  4. Not sure what license their using, but... by curunir · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book program.

    --
    "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
    1. Re:Not sure what license their using, but... by kenneth_martens · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not sure what license their using, but...Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book [oreilly.com] program.

      According to their website, when you sign a contract with O'Reilly you give them "the exclusive right to print, publish, distribute, and sell copies of the book, and works derived from the book, in printed form and in electronic media such as CD-ROM, and to license others to do so, for the duration of the copyright in the book, in all languages, throughout the world."

      That isn't open or free by any stretch of the imagination, so if you want your book to be freely available, O'Reilly isn't your best bet.
    2. Re:Not sure what license their using, but... by davecb · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein, Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released it as part of the Open Book initiative. The license makes the book both free source and free beer. O'Reilly retains the right to print it commercially. Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production crew then generated a very viewable html version of the book, done in sections that are just about exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject. The book is shipped with Samba, is available here on-line, and is being prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we speak. The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled, and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.) Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly. --dave

      --
      davecb@spamcop.net
  5. Get the best of both worlds... by FortKnox · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bruce Eckel publishes books (like "Thinking in Java") as both a free online book, yet sells the printed copy. What he does is publishes the book like normal, but also makes them available for free on his webpage. So if you ever need it to reference, you can jump online to read it. And to support him, most people buy a copy of his book. Its the best of both worlds.

    Another nice advantage is he has books that he isn't finished with available online ("Thinking in Patterns" is one of his), where people can read it and give him feedback before he takes it to the press... Check grammar, find things that are easier to reword, play around with his example code, etc... Its almost like an open source project right there. And he makes money on his books (cause, any java coder that has read "Thinking in Java" owns a copy. Its like a Bible for Java).

    This may be a technique you may consider...

    --
    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
  6. I'm not sure I understand this.... by evilpaul13 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Does the GPL or other licenses have books in mind?

    I'm not sure I'd want people altering what I wrote and releasing it... that's a very different type of speech than program code is.

  7. What's wrong with the GNU Documentation License? by emil · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  8. Go both print and online... by meta4 · · Score: 4, Informative

    My own book (The Instructional Use of Learning Objects) is available online for free (under the OPL) as well as in costs-money print form. Not only does this give you the opportunity to have people submit live errata, etc., but the electronic version of the book is the best press the print version could get. We pre-sold around 500 copies before the book was even to the printer by having the material online.

    The other great opportunity afforded by having the book online is the community / discussion you can facilitate if you can convince your publisher to put the URL to the free online version on the cover of your printed book (this was not so easy for me).

    John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid took a similar approach with The Social Life of Information.

  9. Of course there are applicable licenses by Doug+Loss · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Open Content licenses of course, plus the GNU Free Documentation License and the Design Science license. There are undoubtedly others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.

  10. OPL, DocBook by g_dancer · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm currently planning / writing an open source book (" Object Oriented Software Development with PHP ") myself, so I'm interested in other people's experiences, too. I use DocBook to write the book and CVS to manage the XML files. I chose the Open Publication License (OPL), because I think it fits my needs best. Although I just started last week, the first pages are already online, so that I can recieve feedback from readers even at this early stage of writing. This helps in finding topics I should focus on, because there's more interest in it by my prospect readers. HTH, Sebastian

  11. Public Domain by ezfur · · Score: 3, Informative
    Why not enter it into the public domain, then you don't have to worry about a license. The advantage is there is no cost enforce your license.

    Why does everything have to be some sort of 'Open Source'? Long live public domain!!!!

  12. Be Careful with the Publisher by NBrooke271 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You have to be careful when dealing with many paper book publishers when discussing publishing something developed from the Internet. This territory is unfamiliar, and will often lead to dire consequences if all parties involved don't understand what's going on. Take the case of Eric Weisstein, author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. His book was based off of years of his own work on his website, Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics, and some collaboration from outside sources. After CRC published the book, they demanded that the website be taken down, effectively ending all collaborative work on the project. You can read more about the incident here. One calendar year and lots of litigation later, the website is back online. Don't let this happen to you.

    --
    Free messageboards and more! Your girlfriend's seen myWang
  13. More important: how to find a publisher? by Shiny+Metal+S. · · Score: 3, Informative

    My personal recommendation would be The GNU Free Documentation License:

    The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
    But I think we should talk about much more important issue, i.e. how to print a book with such free license. I suppose most of publishers are used to intellectual property and would rather choose some traditional, more restrictive license than the FDL.

    So here's my question: No matter what free license we choose, where should we look for publishers, who will want to print our books?

    --

    ~shiny
    WILL HACK FOR $$$

  14. Re:Hmm by Charles+Dodgeson · · Score: 2, Informative

    As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, the Open Publication License covers the problems mentioned.

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    Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
  15. Open source means they can sell it. by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Informative
    Imagine that you truly post the source to the book (LaTeX or something), and someone latexs it and prints off a thousand copies at Kinko's, has it bound, and sells them for $10 on eBay. You'll have to use something like GPL, but does GPL really apply to books?

    If other people weren't allowed to sell it, it wouldn't be open source. A GPL-style license like the GFDL doesn't protect the author from the situation you describe; it encourages it.

    there's always some asshole that wants to make a buck at someone else's expense.
    Do you think Linus Torvalds considers Red Hat to be a bunch of "assholes?"

    Your remark about selling a thousand copies on E-Bay is naive. If you want to think about it realistically, very few books make much money for their authors. Most copylefted books that are available in print are self-published, and it's not easy to sell a thousand copies of a self-published book. If you really want to pay the rent by writing books, basically you need to pick one of the more lucrative categories (cookbooks, romance novels,...), and work at it full time.

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    Find free books.