Hey guys!
I am wandering on very thin ground at the moment. I hope and will try
not to trip on any bad places. Lets see ...
As I understand the situation is like follows:
Now is the time were at least a little amount of money must come from
all the effort put into the project. I think nobody here has money as
her or his main reason to contribute, but some also need money to be
able to continue.
The project must stay free, that is an requirement of the LGPL. That
means that the sources must be available at all times. And they are !
For documentation everyone is free to download the manual sources and
build the docu in whatever format they like.
The revenue should come from a precompiled PDFed version of the docu.
There is very small fee for the ready PDF version to avoid the hassle of
downloading and compiling the docu themselves. I think that is fair. It
guarantees LPGL and allows everybody to continue with putting work into
the project.
The jumping point of this discussion and this thread is:
Is the zipped HTML version a "threat" to the PDF version, meaning: would
providing an archive with HTML lower the "sales" from the PDF version ?
Opinions may differ here in how big the impact may be. But I think this
is no real big issue and I did give up my point of view here and agreed
with not to provide a zip of HTML.
I kindly ask you guys to consider doing the same. And if you want to do
me a personal favor do not continue this email thread (If you absolutly
can't hold back, I suggest starting a new thread named different).
I hope I could clarify what happened and did not not say anything really
bad. Let's see if the ground holds at the time I do my next steps ...
Best wishes,
Tobias
PS: The link to the source tarball is broken on the website at the
moment. Probably because cvs moves ...
Ole Husgaard wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Tom Cook wrote:
> > On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Juha-P Lindfors wrote:
> > > On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Ole Husgaard wrote:
> > > > Really hope I am misunderstanding
> > > > something here.
> > >
> > > You are. The documentation in all of its forms is available in the
> > > CVS. You're free to co and build it. The CVS includes all parts of the
> > > documentation.
> >
> > So why no bundled HTML download?
>
> I think that this may be a bit stupid:
> When the zipped docs are not available,
> what are people that want HTML docs to
> be available locally going to do?
> They simply use a recursive web
> mirroring tool, generating about three
> times as much traffic as downloading a
> zip would.
> With GNU wget, mirroring the docs from
> the jboss site is a one-line command.
> That is a lot easier than checking out
> from CVS, if you are not a programmer.
>
> The question still remains: Is the
> documentation free (as in freedom)?
> And if the documentation is not free,
> who owns it?
>
> In more general terms, I think it is
> worth thinking about this question:
>
> How much do we want to hinder access
> to (and use of) JBoss in order to
> avoid competing with commercial
> subprojects?
>
> For example, if a commercial entity
> starts selling JBoss binaries, should
> we stop distributing JBoss binaries?
>
> What would the impact be, if we start
> telling potential users that they have
> to either pay for a binary, or learn
> how to check out from CVS and compile
> Java code?
>
> Tricky questions that IMHO deserve
> serious consideration and public
> discussion.
>
> But it seems to me that the decision
> of forbidding the distribution of
> a zipped HTML manual was made behind
> closed doors. I saw no announcement
> of such a decision, only a CVS removal
> of the zip file.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Ole Husgaard.
