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Collaborative Online Textbook Project
rocketjam writes "OpenTextBook.org is a new project to create a free, open text book 'collaboratively written by anyone on the internet', using a Creative Commons license. Citing the free software development model and the philosophy that underlies much of that effort, OpenTextBook.org's introduction says this philosophy should apply 'at its most basic to the learning of science.' They hope the project will help to counter the current governmental trend of strengthening the scope, duration and rights of intellectual property owners while cutting back on the fair use rights of individuals. The current state of the project is available as a daily snapshot pdf file which contains the introduction to the project and 9 chapters mostly covering math at this time."
Competition might be good when all project involved have a lot of people (or money) behind them, but I think these free book projects are lacking volunteers.
Wikimedia Foundation, the one that also hosts Wikipedia, has a similar project called Wikibooks. It also runs on the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia, and the contents are licensed under the GFDL.
The given Creative Commons license prohibits commercial usage of the material. The GNU FDL permits it - for example, the German Wikipedia is now selling printed copies of its first WikiReader book. This makes it impossible to import OpenTextBook content into Wikipedia.
The other way round, the GNU FDL requires that all derivative works permit commercial usage as well, which makes it impossible to put WikiBooks content into OpenTextBook (copyleft). Fair use would be an exception.
I love C++
The two licenses are CERTAINLY incompatible. Prohibiting commercial usage of the materials is in express opposition to the great work of the GFDL folks, who far from prohibiting commercial redistribution, actually encourage such behavior with this phrase from the license: "either commercially or noncommercially."
That particular Creative Commons license totally bites. If I contribute to one of the books, I can't sell a copy of it when I'm done. Huh?
The introduction to the text explains all of this; it's written in TeX (PDF is just used as a common publishing format) with the graphics rendered via gnuplot or as an .eps file; it sounds like they're making it a priority to stick to free, open, commonly available formats and protocols (no Mathematica plots for instance).
If you find this interesting, check out my Free Curriculum Project and the Free High School Science Texts project (to which I am a very minor contributor).
Both of these projects use the FDL.
-Peter
"Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money."
:) But I'm just talking about getting a book into print. Not much to it.
Not much. You can get a book published and on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the other internet bookstores for under $500, assuming you have all of the talent to produce the content. Basically, all you _have_ to have are ISBN's ($350 for 10, I think) and a lightningsource.com account ($150 per ISBN), and everything is taken care of. Well, you need to promote it
Actually, if you don't care about which distribution channels you go through, you can do it through CafePress.com for free (they don't care if you don't have an ISBN).
Engineering and the Ultimate
Yes the two licenses are incompatible. I'm a contributor to both the Wikipedia (GFDL) and the linuxquestions.org wiki (Creative Commons). It's a real pain to have to do an article on RMS over again, with all the inevitable flamewars involved, when there's an "open" article just over there... The Creative Commons (by-sa to be exact) is better for this sort of thing (the GFDL can mean that a 1-2 page article comes with 12 pages of legalese). But the Wikipedia was started before the Creative Commons, and migrating is non-trivial since the individual contributors (many of whom are anons) are the real copyright holders. If anybody wants to do a wiki encyclopedia under the Creative Commons, let me know.