I've taken on the task of reorganizing the Tomcat documentation. I
have some questions involving licensing and copyright on submitted
materials. I'm not quite sure how the Apache license applies to
publishing material outside the regular code distribution. In
particular, I'd like to reserve the right for a doc author to publish
docs he writes as standalone articles, or as chapters in a book, and
maybe even get paid for that; at the same time, I want to preserve the
rights of the project to keep the docs free/open and in the distro,
and for other authors (and the Apache Foundation) to get credit where
credit is due.
Assuming that the documentation is organized as a series of files,
where each file has a primary author (Alice) who is explicitly named
at the time of the file's creation...
I'd like to list a few :-) scenarios and ask you whether the license
allows/disallows/doesn't apply to each.
Alice publishes...
- original file verbatim
- original file slighly revised or trimmed down
- file as revised (but not rewritten) by other authors
- file written by other author (Oliver)
- a large part of the documentation set, perhaps edited, revised,
or trimmed to suit the needs of the
- entire documentation set, edited
- entire documentation set, verbatim
as...
- a page on Alice's own Web site
- an article in an online magazine
- an article in a print magazine
- a chapter in a book authored solely by Alice
- a chapter in a book with other chapters written by other primary authors
- an entire book
for...
- free
- a flat payment
- ongoing royalties
citing...
- only the author (Alice)
- "just" the Apache project
- the Apache project with a link to the original documentation
- the Apache project and all individual authors
- the Apache project, all individual authors, and all editors
(names culled from CVS if necessary)
My reading of the Apache license is that all of the scenarios are
allowed, as long as you cite something like "This product includes
software developed by the Apache Software Foundation
(http://www.apache.org/)" (or maybe "software and documentation") but
I may be missing something.
Does this mean that if a publisher wanted to take the whole doc tree
and publish it verbatim, and charge $49.95 a copy, he could? Would he
also have to include the source code, maybe as a CD-ROM insert?
Finally, once Alice has published a revised version -- say, as a book
in print -- then does the Apache project have the right to pull all
her changes back in to the CVS tree, even if she doesn't want them to?
Thanks!
- Alex
--
Alex Chaffee mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
jGuru - Java News and FAQs http://www.jguru.com/alex/
Creator of Gamelan http://www.gamelan.com/
Founder of Purple Technology http://www.purpletech.com/
Curator of Stinky Art Collective http://www.stinky.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
