On Mon, 15 May 2006, John Goerzen wrote: > Kern's main concern (correct me if I'm wrong, Kern) is that he > doesn't want someone to be able to publish and sell paper versions > of the manual. > > Is it possible to get a license that would be both DFSG-free and > meet Kern's requirements? Would the FDL work in some fashion (given > our recent GR on the subject?) Not suprisingly, the GFDL doesn't protect against this type of use either. The GPL itself would work, and would prevent the most trivial publishing and selling of paper versions of the manual because any publishing would need to be accompanied by the source code for the work (or some other mechanism of satisfying GPL Section 2). A person could still go out and sell the work, but once they had sold it, anyone could take the source code and turn around and publish it themselves, and you'd basically end up with a case where the publishers were selling the books at cost, and not making money off of your work. [This is exactly the same situtation as the authors of Bacula themselves are in: their work can be sold and used commercially, but because of the way the market works, only people with money to waste would buy it.] > From: Kern Sibbald <kern@sibbald.com> > > > Specifically, the problems that I see are: > > > > #1 (Free Redistribution), since copying/selling is restricted > > Yes, selling is restricted without permission. Copying is not > restricted, provided it is for your own use, or for release with > Bacula. I´m not sure I want to change this as I would be a bit > annoyed if someone took the manual, published it and then began to > sell it. This is really something different from selling software > because there is no transformation of the software, whereas printing > a manual, binding it, ... is quite different, It's actually currently possible to transform and sell the software currently as well; it's just that for the reasons mentioned above there's no market rationale for doing so. > > As an author myself, I can understand why you went with that > > license. I wonder if you might consider relicensing the > > documentation. Putting it back under the GPL may be a good way to > > achieve your goals. > > I think putting it under GPL would allow anyone to publish it in > physical form without my permission, which is what I would like to > avoid (at least for the moment). Yes, that's the case. [Personally, I almost like to see works like this being set up as print-on-demand with no overhead and then allow people to make donations to the project as they see fit directly; it solves almost all of the issues.] Don Armstrong -- Junkies were all knitted together in a loose global macrame, the intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics. -- Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ p257 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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