On the subject of Rights and Credits:
These things aren't locked in stone; they change a lot, and sometimes must be individually negotiated. The main "rules" I'm aware of are:
Protecting Content:
It's nearly impossible to protect non-fiction written content. A complete waste of time and energy. The most you might protect is the structural outline, or key paragraphs. It's common for the Table-of-Contents/Site-Navigation-Hierarchy to be considered worthwhile IP.
You can see from Brendan's remarks how little respect is paid even to that; ripping off style and layout is very common. Too close a rip-off and we might awaken the Microsoft Legal Giant, though, on a TOC basis. Yikes.
This rule extends to print. I know of a best seller cook book. The book has been good for 20 years. When a copycat author took the content and changed the wording of each paragraph slightly but no more, the publisher didn't even pursue the copycat publisher in law. Not worth it.
The good side of this is that it's easy to generate content without having to worry much about plagiarism ;-)
Owning Rights:
Owning rights comes down to readership. If you have no readership yet (our case), and/or you pay nothing, then you can ask for no rights in return. Generous people might give you rights. You can always ask.
As a starting point, DevMo (or the reader-friendly name) just needs to protect itself from hostile contributors failing to give "permission-to-use" statements, the same problem as the Gerv has been addressing in the tree.
If people get to keep their rights, they're more motivated to supply content. At the start, we need content.
Later on we can tighten up on rights. There are no lost opportunities; content can alway be re-written. When we have 10,000 readers, then we can ask contributors to surrender some rights in return for the prestige of being on DevMo.
We can start playing rights fun and games at that point, if we want.
Rights shmights ;-). And what about the OPL, anyway?
Credits:
Likewise, the smaller you are, the more credit you have to give, unless contributors don't care.
We have not yet determined if academics or others interested in references and extensive bylines are target readers. If they are, then credits should be extensive. Otherwise, a byline is more than enough, I think. Some readers will be totally confused by a document packed with references.
I think there's certainly a case for some of the Mozilla opinion leaders to provide highly referenced commentary and essays. I can imagine a group of readers who like that sort of thing.
- Nigel. _______________________________________________ mozilla-documentation mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-documentation
