[FM Discuss] the nature of authorship

[Andy Oram]

I guess I owe the list some thoughts, given that I surprised myself yesterday by jumping in protectively over the Regular Expressions chapter. I totally gave up control at first, then I found that the suggestions were going against a vision I had for the book and ended up discovering a "romantic" attachment to the start of the chapter.

I doubt that license makes a difference. Look at the thousands who post Amazon.com reviews--and the many more who put reviews on sites that rate hotels and restaurants and so forth. Who knows the licenses in use? It turns out Amazon.com is pretty liberal. It takes a nonexclusive license to the content. I don't believe most people care.

There's a divide between material that gets mixed in with everybody else's (in a wiki) and material that stands alone with your name on it. I think the people who make a virtual second career posting to Amazon.com do it to build a reputation. (And what good does that do them? I never figured it out.)

O'Reilly was talking to a company that had lots of customers posting to its forums. When we suggested they consolidate advice by making a wiki, they said the posters would balk. Most of the posters were consultants trying to earn points for posting and recruit clients. They wouldn't be recognized as well if they were contributors to a wiki. Not very romantic, but a sign of the ego involved in writing.

FLOSS Manuals encourages participation by recognizing contributors. I don't think that most of them have a strong vision of what the book should be, and such people would have trouble contributing no matter how you organize the work and the resulting material. Some people might do more if recognition were more precise.

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hyde" <adam at flossmanuals.net>
To: "floss" <discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net>
Sent: Saturday, April 11, 2009 4:14:11 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [FM Discuss] the nature of authorship

hi,

I just was asked to discuss a possible panel for wikimania 09 about the
romantic notion of authorship. The panel will possibly reflect on what
authorship is and how it is, or is not, effected by licensing. 

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