[FM Discuss] Front and back matter, copyrights

[Chris Bryant]

On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 23:55 +0200, adam hyde wrote:

> there is no overall copyright given to anything. i have no idea what you
> are referring to. we deal with copyright on a per-chapter basis. if you
> create a chapter you get the copyright.

I think, despite the desire to remain informal, this will be an issue
for a while.  Coming from the GNU/FSF world, I understand very well the
care that should be taken in defining a licensing scheme.

I didn't include everything mentioned in this thread, but there will be
much confusion if a detailed page or two discussing licensing practices
and guidelines for FM isn't put aside for the writers.

CommandLine is pretty explicit: (FDL v1.3 or greater)

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CommandLineIntro/Credits

TurtleArt as  well: (GPL v2 or greater)

http://en.flossmanuals.net/TurtleArt/Credits

What's missing are those couple pages identifying the _reason_ to go
with GPL or FDL (personally, I'd only choose between CC or FDL for
text/images only materials), or other licenses, and also, making sure
everyone understands what that means to include the licenses.  Are you
_sure_ that if a book has ten chapters, and there are several licenses
applied among the chapters, that they are _compatible_ and don't put the
creators at risk once those chapters are compiled into a single
document?

-- 
Chris Bryant,
GNU/Linux Engineer,
chrisbryant at ucla dot edu
https://savannah.gnu.org/users/chrisbryant

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