Michael Stutz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In Section 3 of the Design Science License, it states that > > distribution of the Object Form of a work under the DSL requires > that> "a copy of this License is distributed along with the Work." > In many > > cases, it is easy to include a copy of the license with the Work, > for> example when distributing a copy online, or when distributing a > > full-length book. However, there are cases where it would be > hard to > > distribute a copy of the License with a Work. > > I am looking into a better way to do this, so that it isn't so much of > a hassle on the part of the publisher, but so that people also know > how to get the sources should they want them. It will be clarified in > an update to the license, which should happen soon. It should not be > necessary to include a copy of the license when distributing a work in > object form; including the full sources (which would contain a copy of > the license with its copyright information) will still be one option, > but you should be able to include just a written offer for the sources > or (if you are not a commercial entity), pass along someone else's > written offer and not include the license at all.
The best way to avoid hassles of this sort is, I think, to simply offer a lot of different options; then chances are greater that at least one will be practical. With regards to the particular issue of making the license available when distributing the Object Form, I would suggest at least the following three options: (1) Distributing a copy of the license along with the work, either in printed or computerized form. (2) Giving a web address where the license may be downloaded. This has already been done; for example, a recent article in the New Scientist was copylefted under the DSL and gave the web address for the license on the dsl.org site. (3) Giving a mailing address where you can send a stamped, self- addressed envelope and recieve back a printed copy of the License by snail-mail. We could talk to the Free Software Foundation or other copyleft advocacy groups who might be willing to provide this service. Options (2) and (3) should take no more than a few lines of space, which should be convenient even for very short documents. > I expected that some improvements would have to be made to the > license. This is definitely one of them. Certainly, given the broad applicability of the DSL, it would be impossible to foresee all the possible issues that might come up beforehand. > > An example I've been involved with directly is the following: I and > > several other students in activist groups at New York University are > > considering using copyleft with material we create. A good deal of > > our material, such as fact sheets, flyers, and short articles, are > > very short, in many cases no more than a single page. > > You should be able to distribute this material with just a short > copyright notice, and provide the sources to the material should > anyone want them. That's exactly what we were thinking of doing. I'll keep linart updated when we start to do this. On a different subject: was the idea of making a copylefted alternative to the Internet Movie Database ever implemented? If not, I would be interested in doing this. A discussion (at www.greenspun.com/bboard/q- and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001ghj; the link seems to be broken, but a cached version at Google is available) doesn't say. I think it would be possible to use a variant of "WikiWiki" software (a system for the decentralized, open creation and maintenance of websites; see http:// c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb for an introduction to the concept) to coordinate such a large project (in particular, I am inspired by the example of the surprisingly successful project to build a copylefted encyclopedia with WikiWiki at www.wikipedia.com). Joel Schlosberg
