[FM Discuss] License of draft manuals?

[Daniel James]

Hi Tomi,
> What is the license of draft manuals? We usually stick a license into a
> manual when it is published?

In Booktype 1.6.0 you can set or change the license at any time, in the
Settings tab of the editor.

At Sourcefabric we made the decision to license our books GPLv3 to be
compatible with the software licenses, so that source code could be
pasted into the manuals without causing license complications.

> Which means that draft manuals have an
> unknown license?

If you have not declared an explicit license then the book is 'all
rights reserved' by default. Under the Berne Convention an author does
not have to register copyright in order to have copyright:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

So if you want a book to be unambiguously free-licensed you should
declare this from the start, and ideally get contributors to acknowledge
in writing that their work will be free-licensed.

Cheers!

Daniel