Peter Kupfer wrote:
> I would like to see an area that distinguishes between like the lead
> author/owner of the file and the contributors.
So would I, but one of the consequences of the CC-BY license is that we
can't. We have to make sure everyone is equally prominent. The CC-BY is
designed like this in purpose. It is meant to avoid the following
scenario:
* Peter makes a fantastic work of art.
* Daniel makes one tiny change to it.
* Daniel puts in big huge letters "design by DANIEL CARRERA!!"
and adds a footnote on page 37 in 8pt font saying "yeah, and Peter
did some stuff too".
By requiring Daniel to make Peter's attribution "at least as prominient"
as his own, we can minimize this sort of abuse.
But fear not Peter! We still have the website. :-) If you are really
keen, we can use that to add extra recognition to people. Like, we can put
a trophy on the page with the inscription "Peter rulez". Or we can assign
ourselves silly titles. Like, Linda can be the Empress of Draw, Jean can
be the Tzarina of Writer and you can be the Lord Captain Commander of
Reviews. :-)
> As for license stuff. I don't really understand what the GPL is.
The GPL is the most common license for Free Software/Open Source. It
covers 95% of the stuff you're running. From the Linux kernel itself,
through to the C libraries, Gnome, KDE, and most programs you run.
Here's a CC-ized summary of it:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
The advantage of making the GPL one of our licenses is that then our work
can be combined with most open source software, including OpenOffice.org
itself.
> What I got from the e-mails was that if someone is to print the OOo
> Authors stuff, they have to include the source code. This seems stupid
> when it come to documents.
Correct. And it's one of the reasons why the CC-BY is so important here.
Using a dual CC-BY / GPL means that any given distributor can pick either
one or the other (or both). When we distribute hard copies, we will pick
just the CC-BY. Hence, circunventing the source code thing.
This should be applied in general:
* Sources are distributed under both CC-BY and GPL.
* Non-sources (e.g. PDF, paper) take advantage of the CC-BY permission
and are redistributed using only the CC-BY.
So we will never have to worry about the sources. When people get the GPL
will be precisely when they get the sources.
This is a good example of how well this dual license would work. Having
both licenses means that we can pick whichever is most convenient for the
given task. If we want to embed the guides into OOo (e.g. as a complement
to the online help) we can use the GPL. If you want to sell hard copies,
we can use the CC-BY.
Cool eh?
Cheers,
--
Daniel Carrera | I don't want it perfect,
Join OOoAuthors today! | I want it Tuesday.
http://oooauthors.org |
