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GNU is Not Unix

Tackling Open-Source Book Projects? 135

Posted by Cliff from the taking-a-book-by-its-horns dept.
Wheeler asks: "I am currently writing a book ('The Directory Services Cookbook', shameless self-plug), which I plan to publish under some form of open license, once it's finished. At this point I am really looking for clues on which license would be appropriate for your classic, not-necessary-digital work of creation. And while we're at it: Can other OS book projects share experience on how to tackle the process of writing in general. I personally think a little Linus T. should be in every project doing editing, checking for style and layout, the works. Any comments?"
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Tackling Open-Source Book Projects? More

Tackling Open-Source Book Projects?

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  • A great site for open source books (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    linuxdocs.org [linuxdocs.org] also, there are plenty of normal books thrown all around on the internet...all you have to do is search

    • Re:A great site for open source books (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Except that this site is a bare mirror of the real linuxdoc site, linuxdoc.org [linuxdoc.org]. Otherwise known as the LDP.


      If you are going to mirror, at least give credit where credit is due.

  • Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jrockway ( 229604 )
    I understand that you want to give something back to the community that gave you linux (as do I with verious open source projects [sourceforge.net]), but it seems that an "open source" book might be too easy to steal. Imagine that you truly post the source to the book (LaTeX or something), and someone latexs it and prints off a thousand copies at Kinko's, has it bound, and sells them for $10 on eBay. You'll have to use something like GPL, but does GPL really apply to books? This is pretty new area, so be very careful (if your book is pretty good, and worth real money) -- there's always some asshole that wants to make a buck at someone else's expense.

    [You could say the same thing about Linux distros though. The difference is that good distros give something back. In the book example, maybe someone writes a few chapters and sells printed copies of your book with the extra chapters, but then gives you the copyright on the extra chapters. It's really hard to say...]

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Informative)

      by J'raxis ( 248192 )
      Theres the GFDL, a GPL variant for documentation, that might be useful.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dachshund ( 300733 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:52PM (#2890569)
      Imagine that you truly post the source to the book (LaTeX or something), and someone latexs it and prints off a thousand copies at Kinko's, has it bound, and sells them for $10 on eBay.

      I don't really understand the problem. As you point out, somebody could do the same with a Linux distro, or any other piece of OSS. Generally, customers won't be stupid enough to shell out much dough for a product that they could obtain for no cost, unless they feel that they're getting something for what they're spending (like the printing and binding.)

      The danger would come from somebody attempting to claim a new copyright on your work (fairly easy to deal with, if you register your work), or somebody modifying and redistributing it as their own work. In either situation, you've got a decent court case. I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot. Hopefully, nobody would be stupid enough to test you.

      The author could always keep an eye out for somebody trying to do this, and potentially undercut him/her by selling copies for a lower price.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Informative)

        by Charles Dodgeson ( 248492 )
        As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, the Open Publication License [opencontent.org] covers the problems mentioned.

      • I don't know how strong OSS licenses may be in the print arena, but if you did have to go to court, I think you'd have at least an even shot.

        No offense, but it sounds YANAL. Which means that you really don't have any idea what kind of "shot" Wheeler would have in court (and neither do I). Thinking that there would be an "even shot" is logical, rational, etc. The courts don't follow yours and my logic, unfortunately. If there is any serious worry about handling potential OSS violations, then the author(s) should contact an IP lawyer before publishing anything at all.

        • No offense, but it sounds YANAL.

          Why in god's name would I take offense at that?

          You're right, of course. The author should talk to an IP lawyer. Who'll probably tell him/her the same thing. That these licenses (which were put together by IP lawyers) have never been tested, are fairly experimental, etc. Then the author will just have to take a chance. Really, any situation that involves going to court could be considered something of a loss, anyway, given the cost.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The problem with books is that adding value to an open source book....which is in a digital format is as easy as publishing it. So now publishing houses can add value to it....i.e. make a hardcopy....and sell it, and make a profit at what they feel the extra value that they added was.

        If you do have a good book that is worth real money. What publishing house wouldn't want to publish and profit on it....when they can get the content for free....and so easily.

        Its way too easy to be taken advantage of.

        I think an OpenSource/Non-profit publishing house would be preferable. And that distributing of hard-copies of the book by anyone except the OpenSource publishing house should be strictly forbidden.
    • Imagine that you truly post the source to the book (LaTeX or something), and someone latexs it and prints off a thousand copies at Kinko's, has it bound, and sells them for $10 on eBay. You'll have to use something like GPL, but does GPL really apply to books?

      If other people weren't allowed to sell it, it wouldn't be open source. A GPL-style license like the GFDL doesn't protect the author from the situation you describe; it encourages it.

      there's always some asshole that wants to make a buck at someone else's expense.
      Do you think Linus Torvalds considers Red Hat to be a bunch of "assholes?"

      Your remark about selling a thousand copies on E-Bay is naive. If you want to think about it realistically, very few books make much money for their authors. Most copylefted books that are available in print are self-published, and it's not easy to sell a thousand copies of a self-published book. If you really want to pay the rent by writing books, basically you need to pick one of the more lucrative categories (cookbooks, romance novels,...), and work at it full time.

      • Most copylefted books that are available in print are self-published
        Doh -- I don't know why I said that. That's not true. What I should have said was that most copylefted books are not print-published. (For data, see my sig.)

        Anyway, as we say in the sciences, an error has been discovered on page 1 of the paper, which invalidates all the later equations. However, none of the paper's conclusions are affected. :-)

        Could someone mod down both this commend and its parent? My karma's too high anyway...

  • Put all the content in Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:28PM (#2890433)
    Use the Wikipedia license.

    Many people create valuable content and then insist on hosting or publishing the content themselves.

    Instead consider contributing your content to a public content repository like Wikipedia [wikipedia.com].

    This allows other people to easily contribute to and update your work, even if you lose interest or something happens to you. Additionally, your work will be redundantly stored and likely accessible for the far future.

    • Re:Put all the content in Wikipedia (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A couple of points (from a Wikipedian):

      1. Wikipedia currently uses the GNU Free Documentation License; we didn't formulate our own.

      2. Wikipedia isn't a general content repository, but an encyclopedia project. The project welcomes articles on all topics under the sun, but entire books aren't our mandate.

      That being said, anyone can set up a wiki and develop any type of content. All you need is a webserver and some software. Wikipedia uses UseModWiki [usemod.com], which is written in Perl and is under the GPL. --Stephen Gilbert [wikipedia.com]

      • A couple more points from another Wikipedian:

        1. Wikipedia isn't currently actually compliant with the GNU FDL, since it doesn't have the necessary license notice. Also, the intent of the Bomis people is slightly out of sync with what the GFDL allows (with respect to attribution), though their hearts are in the right place.

        Instead of adding something to Wikipedia, just release the book under the GNU FDL. Then content from the book could be incorporated into Wikipedia by anyone who wants to.

        The GFDL seems overly ornate, but I've done a careful analysis of it, and particularly for print works it's concise and complete, especially if you don't have any invariant sections.

        If that's the case, then all you have to do to be compliant with the GFDL is include the license and the license notice, make it clear what the title, author, and publisher are, and make available a "transparent" copy (e.g. a url to an ASCII/Tex etc. version of the book).

  • Not sure what license their using, but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by curunir ( 98273 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:31PM (#2890453) Homepage Journal
    Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book [oreilly.com] program.

    • Not sure what license their using, but...Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book [oreilly.com] program.

      According to their website [oreilly.com], when you sign a contract with O'Reilly you give them "the exclusive right to print, publish, distribute, and sell copies of the book, and works derived from the book, in printed form and in electronic media such as CD-ROM, and to license others to do so, for the duration of the copyright in the book, in all languages, throughout the world."

      That isn't open or free by any stretch of the imagination, so if you want your book to be freely available, O'Reilly isn't your best bet.

    • Re:Not sure what license their using, but... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Take a look at CommandPrompt's book "Practical ProgreSQL" (http://www.commandprompt.com), which is published in OpenBook by O'Reilly. It is available online at CommandPrompt.
    • I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein, Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released it as part of the Open Book initiative. The license [oreilly.com] makes the book both free source and free beer. O'Reilly retains the right to print it commercially. Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production crew then generated a very viewable html version of the book, done in sections that are just about exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject. The book is shipped with Samba, is available here [oreilly.com] on-line, and is being prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we speak. The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled, and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.) Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly. --dave

  • Here's your license (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What you are reading is your book.

    You may share this book with anyone, provided the following:

    1) You must provide a full copy of the book, including this license to each person you are sharing this book with.

    2) If you make changes to this book, you may not remove this license.

    That wasn't so hard, was it?
  • Well,

    I don't have much experience in writing OS books, but I would say, start with your basics:

    Outline what you plan to do
    Get a rough idea of chapters, etc.
    get a rough draft
    submit it to friends for editing/proofreading, etc.
    get it back, "spice" it up some, re-submit for editing.
    Have them check this version out and make any additional changes, etc...and submit for our approval ;)

    btw, this is all basic stuff, but I wanted to help and this is all I had to offer.

    Guess that makes me pathetic :0

  • Get the best of both worlds... (Score:5, Informative)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:34PM (#2890468) Homepage Journal
    Bruce Eckel [bruceeckel.com] publishes books (like "Thinking in Java") as both a free online book, yet sells the printed copy. What he does is publishes the book like normal, but also makes them available for free on his webpage. So if you ever need it to reference, you can jump online to read it. And to support him, most people buy a copy of his book. Its the best of both worlds.

    Another nice advantage is he has books that he isn't finished with available online ("Thinking in Patterns" is one of his), where people can read it and give him feedback before he takes it to the press... Check grammar, find things that are easier to reword, play around with his example code, etc... Its almost like an open source project right there. And he makes money on his books (cause, any java coder that has read "Thinking in Java" owns a copy. Its like a Bible for Java).

    This may be a technique you may consider...
    • And to support him, most people buy a copy of his book [emphasis added]

      I would be very surprised if greater than 50% of the people who read that book (or any free online book) pay for a copy. If Stephen King couldn't do it [com.com], then it certainly can't be commonplace.

      • you may be right, that 50% of the people reading it actually buy it. the fact still remains that Bruce does make money doing business that way, and he likes it. he also does trainning classes from what i recall, so that probably REALLY helps. the chapters in the books are essentially lessions from his classes. i don't think that open/free books are always a good way to go (isn't there an open/free samba book? i wonder how profitable it is).
      • But the askslashdot author wants to make the book free. Sounds like he doesn't need a profit. So, perhaps, he can just make a little side cash. Even if one person pays for it, its more money than he is currently expecting.
      • What Stephen King couldn't do was different: getting people to pay to read it once without getting anything for it.

        Additionally, Stephen King is a well-known hardcopy author. There probably aren't that many people who found out about him by doing a web search for horror novels, found his book, read it online, and considered paying for it.

        On the other hand, if 25% of the people who read the book online pay for a copy, and more than 4 times as many people read it because it should up conveniently in a web search on the subject and they can read it without paying for a book by an author they don't know, he comes out ahead anyway.

        The money he fails to make on the people who don't buy it when they read it is probably much much less than the money he'd have to spend on advertizing in order to get the same number of people to read it. The cost of promoting a book (unless you're Stephen King, and don't need to promote it) is greater than the rest of the costs of publication combined.
        • I agree with what you said, but you didn't mention some important things:

          1. King told his readers he'd stop writing chapters if he didn't get payments from 50% (?) of them.

          2. It was a failure. He didn't get the payment rate he'd said he'd require. He lowered the requirement, and still didn't get the requested percentage. After that, he stopped writing, and he hasn't finished the book.

          3. The basic concept was completely alien to the kind of open-source philosophy that the original poster was talking about. There was no concept of enriching the general pool of human knowledge. It was just an experiment with unconventional marketing techniques. I'm not saying this makes King bad and evil; he just wasn't doing anything related to free information.

    • Grey Ghost Games (http://www.fudgerpg.com) does this with their Fudge rules: you get get it for free off their website, or you can buy the book (which has a few nice extras).
    • While I agree with you that this would be a good solution both for the author and for the community, there are some issues.

      Chances are if this person went to get his book published, the publisher would then own the right to reproduce the book. Most publishers would not let you write a book and give it away electronically as well (unless you are steven king, etc.).

      They just don't think it would make good business sense, and most publishers probably are in the business to make money, not for good will.

      I think like you though, if it can be done, it would be a great solution. It won't be easy, though (getting a book published is very hard for those alredy not published).

      • Well, you don't really have to be Stephen King :-) For instance, Programming Ruiby is available in print from Addison Wesley, and is also a free download. O'Reilly has print-published quite a few books that are also free-as-in-something. Baen has made a bunch of their science fiction novels available online. Of course, this is something you'd want to work out early on, when you start negotiating a book contract. I'm sure some publishers are more free-information-friendly than others.

        They just don't think it would make good business sense, and most publishers probably are in the business to make money, not for good will.
        Clearly your generalization fails in some of the cases I mentioned above. I think some publishers have realized that, at least for certain kinds of books, having it available online is a form of free publicity, and doesn't necessarily subtract from sales. After all, most people don't want to read a book off of a computer screen, or have to have it in the form of a stack of unbound, single-sided printer output. Personally (here's my shameless plug), I've had some luck selling printed copies of my own [lightandmatter.com] self-published copylefted books, even though they're free downloads.

        In reply to the original poster's question, you might want to look at (shameless plug #2!) this [theassayer.org] list of copylefted books, which is from the database of my book-reviewing site The Assayer. That way you can get an idea of what licenses other people are using.

      • Well, on a certain level it does depend on who you are, most publishers (and I work for one of 'em) today would be open to such an arangement.

        While many publishers are expermenting with online distribution for profit (i.e. Safari the O'Reilly / PTG online thing), most publisher relize that putting a book online actually increases book sales (unless of course the book is bad to begin with).
      • but as an author you retain the ownership of the book and you are licensing it to publishers for a certain period. You will not automatically be able to put it on the internet because of this, but it does give you some more leverage

  • Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lesinator ( 459276 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:40PM (#2890498)
    I suggest checking out Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing [arsdigita.com]. It is available in both online and print versions (in addition to being a fantastic read).
  • Does the GPL or other licenses have books in mind?

    I'm not sure I'd want people altering what I wrote and releasing it... that's a very different type of speech than program code is.
    • No, that's what the GNU Free Documentation License [fsf.org] is for.

      That's why they use the words software and program in the GPL [fsf.org]

    • Re:I'm not sure I understand this.... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      GPL is not suited for books.

      GPL was designed for interpreted programs (like emacs) or compiled programs, so anyone would look at how they worked, make changes, recompile, and distribute their chages.

      A book is text on a page. Or in a file. If it's printed, you can't prevent the purchaser from making annotations, underlining passages, etc. If it's a text (or even Word) file, you can't prevent someone from editing or printing it. Sure, you can distribute it in a compiled format, like PDF, DVI, or Postscript, but the user can print it out and annotate it.

      So think about what your goal with the text is, and what control you do or don't want over it.

  • Free vs. open-source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by igrek ( 127205 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:42PM (#2890511)
    Do you really need an open-source license or you just want your book to be free?

    There's a difference between two. Open-source means anyone can take your source code (in LaTeX or something like that), make some changes and produce his own version of the book. I have some doubts about this model, though. Most ot the free books I've seen are just free. Anyone can use them but not contribute.

    If you really want to produce a "collaborative" book, take a look at the Wiki [c2.com] model.

    • Do you really need an open-source license or you just want your book to be free?

      You can either completely give up your copyright as the writer of the work (why would you do that?) or use what GNU recommends - free documentation license FDL [gnu.org] to make sure you get proper credit, retain some rights, give others rights to modify, redistribute, etc., etc.

  • What's wrong with the GNU Documentation License? (Score:3, Informative)

    by emil ( 695 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:44PM (#2890522)
    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

    • Re:What's wrong with the GNU Documentation License (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What's wrong with the GNU Documentation License?

      The FSF.
    • I have a project that I'm going to launch soon at Learn-Orienteering.org [learn-orienteering.org].

      I think that the FDL is the Free Documentation License which is most clearly formulated, so it is unlikely that one will run into trouble if using it.

      However, it has it's problems too. My project is mostly about making tutorials, and one important part of it is to encourage people to make printed booklets and distribute freely.

      The problem is that the FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with any copy you make. That would defeat the purpose of the booklet: You can't make a 4-page booklet if you would have to include a 4-page copy of the license.

      That's the main problem with the FDL. I've been communicating with FSF on this, and apparently, it is not really a problem with FDL, but with copyright law. You have to include a license, or people would have to assume the worst (i.e. you only have fair use rights. Besides, most people don't think they have fair use rights either, because of all the propaganda, so they will not make a copy even if you tell them to...)

      The FSF's best suggestion is that I, as the copyright holder, grant an individual license to everyone who wants to make a booklet. I think this is a sub-optimal solution, because the people who join me in making content needs predictability too. They need to know under what conditions the stuff they write will be distributed.

      Take, as an example, the GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO [cryptnet.net]. It links the FDL. When I organized a keysigning party, I handed out a paper copy of parts of the HOWTO to every participant, without a copy of the licence. In doing that, I think I broke the FDL (I plead "not guilty" your honor, I didn't understand the FDL at that time! :-) ). But, I think that is how everyone would do it, and in fact, I think it is how the author intended it to be. Actually, I don't think the author followed the instructions in the FDL either.

      I guess I have made this point: The FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with every copy you make, but nobody is going to do that with simple handouts.

      BTW, I'm having a bit of problem hosting this project for the next couple of months... Anybody have a web server with a little bandwidth to spare?

  • Clearinghouse for editorial contributors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EisPick ( 29965 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:45PM (#2890531)
    My technology skills are too soft to contribute as a developer to an open-source project, but I'm an experienced editor who'd love to have the opportunity to copy edit for a project or two.

    I wouldn't know where to start to find a match for my time and skills. Are there resources that list projects like the one above looking for editorial assistance? If not, should there be one?
  • There doesn't seem to be much precedent for writing "open source" books, per se. My suggestion is that you contact a publisher and work out a contract that allows them to exclusively produce and publish the written form of the book, but that also allows the book to be freely available online. Maybe you could also work out an agreement that the publisher would give up all rights to the book after 5 years or so. You probably won't make any money on the book (but that's not your aim, right?) but as far as I see, that's probably the only way you are going to get the book published in paper form. (You can always distribute it in electronic form online by yourself, but it helps to have a paper edition.)

  • Open Book approach (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Champaign ( 307086 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:47PM (#2890546) Homepage Journal
    One thing that kind of gets me scatching my head (I'm sure its my intellectual shortcomings, not those who initate these projects) is the idea that "I'll finish this then release it as open source". I've seen the same thing with software projects where people say "I'll release the code once I've cleaned it up".

    A better approach to my mind would be to start it open source from the get-go. Put your outline, rough content, ideas, etc. out there, and get peer review throughout the process. I'm sure people could contribute to every stage as you write the work, and opening it up in SOME format (it doesn't have to be pretty) wouldn't be too time consuming.

    For what its worth...

    • Re:Open Book approach (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @07:16PM (#2891013) Journal
      One thing that kind of gets me scatching my head (I'm sure its my intellectual shortcomings, not those who initate these projects) is the idea that "I'll finish this then release it as open source".

      I've been considering doing this very thing. Here's what I've come up with. Most of these apply equally well to books and programming projects.

      1. Vision: If you have a specific vision driving the creation, it may be easier to finish the project (to at least a first approximation) then to try to convey that vision to a loosely-knit bunch of developers/writers who may or may not care about or even understand your vision. Once you have code/copy, people can judge whether they like the direction of a project, rather then attempting to steer it early on into what they want. (Team management is not free.)
      2. Reputation: I know I don't have to release The World's Most Beautiful Code/Book to impress people... but open source or not, crap is crap, and most, if not all, early drafts/programs are crap, unless VERY carefully designed from the get-go. (Not something Open Source as a whole is famous for; design tends to be either the exception, or something you consider at version 3. This is not all bad, but one might not want to put one's name on what is essentially pre-alpha code.)
      3. Attacting others: Related to but distinct from reputation, early crap code will probably not attract any one to work on your code/book. (Remember, there's no magic to Open Source; the destiny of your average FreshMeat.net project is probably to attract not a single developer who will stick around in even the medium term.)
      4. Commitment: By putting my project out in the open, it implies a certain level of commitment to it, even if that commitment is replying to numerous emails with "I totally refuse to support that program/correct the book at this time." The "Open Source" culture supports the idea of dumping code into the world in theory, but in fact you can't completely dump something content onto the world without some measure of responsibility for it. I like the fact that if I abandon my project for any reason, NOBODY will give me flack for it; nobody even knows it exists, and that's liberating.
      For my project (estimated odds of EVER being released publically: 10%), "Vision" is my primary reason. I don't want to explain myself any more then I have to. Peer review is likely as not to be crap, both because it's unlikely I'd attract the 'good' reviewers (since they are on bigger name projects), and the reviewers are unlikely to understand where I'm going. I'd only ruffle potential contributors feathers when I tell them that their nifty-snazzy idea completely fails to fit within my framework, and I'm quite uninterested in it. (No matter how you candy coat that, people will still take it quite badly.)

      Personally, I'd recommend having some sort of functional product before releasing anything as open source. The exception (which totally doesn't apply to me!) is if you have a big enough name or big enough project to put something together on the strength of that alone. Imagine one of the big KDE/GNOME developers starting a new component system from scratch, in public. It works; they get all kinds of developers willing to work with them before even a single line of code is written. Now imagine me, "Jerf from Slashdot", making the same (kind of) announcement. The silence is deafening.

      • Re:Open Book approach (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Otter ( 3800 )
        ...agreeing with everything you said but adding a little...

        Despite what Eric Raymond says, the vast majority of open source development is not done collaboratively. A few high profile projects like the Linux kernel and KDE do work that way, but almost everyone else works singly or in small groups. Putting some preliminary work on the web is unlikely to get you any useful help and, as you said, if anything projects that have a public roadmap before making anything useful are mostly regarded as sinkholes.

        Imagine one of the big KDE/GNOME developers starting a new component system from scratch, in public. It works; they get all kinds of developers willing to work with them before even a single line of code is written.

        Even that -- I'm sure Miguel had tons of volunteers to work on Mono but I wonder how many serious developers actually came out of it.

  • Go both print and online... (Score:4, Informative)

    by meta4 ( 4862 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:48PM (#2890550) Homepage
    My own book (The Instructional Use of Learning Objects [reusability.org]) is available online for free (under the OPL [opencontent.org]) as well as in costs-money print form. Not only does this give you the opportunity to have people submit live errata, etc., but the electronic version of the book is the best press the print version could get. We pre-sold around 500 copies before the book was even to the printer by having the material online.

    The other great opportunity afforded by having the book online is the community / discussion you can facilitate if you can convince your publisher to put the URL to the free online version on the cover of your printed book (this was not so easy for me).

    John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid took a similar approach with The Social Life of Information [slofi.com].
    • I've used them for all my arcade articles [galstar.com]. And you know what? When another site stole my material, they stood 100% behind me. (Not referring to the E10k review that was on Slashdot. I'm talking about my arcade game parts primer [galstar.com] material.

      And, of course, as the person above said, you can print a book, too. I recommend this license. You can go to their page and check out the terms to see if they are to your liking.
      • I also use the opencontent license, for short stories, comics, and other arts. I'm no lawyer, but it passed the "sounds like it lays everything out clearly enough so a human being can understand the license" rule for me.

        I think it's a good license.

  • Copyright with a clause (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 2Bits ( 167227 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:54PM (#2890578)
    If you want to do something nice, but want to keep the control over the contents/books while you are still interested/have time/are alive, I suggest the following:
    • Hold on to the copyright of the contents/book
    • Publish an electronic copy so that people can download for free
    • Reserve the right for yourself to publish hard copy (so you can make some money on your work)

    So far, this is somewhat like what Bruce Eckel is doing. First, you give something back to the community, but you still can make some money, without having your work stolen.

    But, add the following clauses to your copyright:
    • The contents of the book will go to the public domain whenever you declare so. If you are not interested in maintaining it anymore, or you have made enough money on your work, you can give it to the whole humanity. Someone might pick it up and continue the work.
    • The contents of the book will go the the public domain whenever you die. This way, if something happens to you, your work is automatically belonged to the whole humanity, and not to a specific entity. So, you are doing good even after death (with a small caveat though, if your book is really good and worth a lot of money, someone might want you dead as soon as possible :)
    • You reserve the right to change the license/copyright, or have a secondary license (e.g. GPL) to fall back into. In case you can't do while you are conscious or alive, the contents automatically fall back into the secondary license. So, you can even control the license after you are dead, or while you are being vegetable (not that I'm wishing you that, far from it :)

    Just my $0.02.

  • Of course there are applicable licenses (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doug Loss ( 3517 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @05:54PM (#2890579)
    The Open Content [opencontent.org] licenses of course, plus the GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org] and the Design Science [dsl.org] license. There are undoubtedly others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.
    • At the risk of getting moded down for "redundent", I'm going to add my voice to the suggesting to look at the open content license [opencontent.org], but also at a varient of it, the Open Publication License [opencontent.org] which allows you to restrict publication of printed copies in various ways.

      Much of the Open Content license appears to be geared toward software documentation, while the open publication license is more flexible. But I do have a question (I probably should have started a new thread). Does anyone know of a use of the Open Publication license outside of Geekhood? I am working on a book proposal for a non-geek book, and am wondering if I can point potential publishers to precedents for use of things like the open publication license.

  • OPL, DocBook (Score:3, Informative)

    by g_dancer ( 308076 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:02PM (#2890619) Homepage
    I'm currently planning / writing an open source book (" Object Oriented Software Development with PHP " [sebastian-bergmann.de]) myself, so I'm interested in other people's experiences, too. I use DocBook to write the book and CVS to manage the XML files. I chose the Open Publication License (OPL) [opencontent.org], because I think it fits my needs best. Although I just started last week, the first pages are already online, so that I can recieve feedback from readers even at this early stage of writing. This helps in finding topics I should focus on, because there's more interest in it by my prospect readers. HTH, Sebastian

  • Public Domain (Score:3, Informative)

    by ezfur ( 534240 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:09PM (#2890654)
    Why not enter it into the public domain, then you don't have to worry about a license. The advantage is there is no cost enforce your license.

    Why does everything have to be some sort of 'Open Source'? Long live public domain!!!!

  • I'll even volunteer to write the AD/NDS/Streettalk/OpenLDAP integration chapters, if you like. My copy of VINES arrived only yesterday, and I'm itching to have some fun with it.

  • Definitely use cvs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:11PM (#2890665)
    I would separate each chapter to be checked out as a whole from CVS.

    Version control is indispensible for stuff like this, yet people rarely think to use it.

  • What do you want the license to do? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by buckrogers ( 136562 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:12PM (#2890667) Homepage
    Do you want to just give the book away for anyone to do anything with? Then just release the book into the public domain.

    Do you want to allow free redistribution, but restrict people from making any changes? Then say that in your license.

    Do you want to allow changes, but want the changes to be clearly attributed to the new authors? Then say that.

    These things aren't rocket science. Just say what you want to happen with your book in clear straitforward language and that is how it will be.

  • Be Careful with the Publisher (Score:4, Informative)

    by NBrooke271 ( 260498 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {ekoorB.kciN}> on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:16PM (#2890689) Homepage
    You have to be careful when dealing with many paper book publishers when discussing publishing something developed from the Internet. This territory is unfamiliar, and will often lead to dire consequences if all parties involved don't understand what's going on. Take the case of Eric Weisstein, author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. His book was based off of years of his own work on his website, Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics [wolfram.com], and some collaboration from outside sources. After CRC published the book, they demanded that the website be taken down, effectively ending all collaborative work on the project. You can read more about the incident here [wolfram.com]. One calendar year and lots of litigation later, the website is back online. Don't let this happen to you.
    • In 1987 I was involved in the production of a bibliography of computational linguistics [stanford.edu] produced by CSLI [stanford.edu] and distrubted by Chicago University Press. The compilers of the bibliograhpy wanted to make the biliography (in refer format ) publically available. Chicago wasn't happy about that and the compromise was to allow the bibliography to be publically searchable, but with restrictions to prevent grabbing the whole thing.

      So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu [mailto] with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..

      Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.

  • More important: how to find a publisher? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Shiny Metal S. ( 544229 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:31PM (#2890761) Homepage

    My personal recommendation would be The GNU Free Documentation License [gnu.org]:

    The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
    But I think we should talk about much more important issue, i.e. how to print a book with such free license. I suppose most of publishers are used to intellectual property and would rather choose some traditional, more restrictive license than the FDL.

    So here's my question: No matter what free license we choose, where should we look for publishers, who will want to print our books?

  • Linux Cookbook is a real "Free" book (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:51PM (#2890886)
    dsl.org [dsl.org] has Linux Cookbook which is an open source book that seems to be doing really well as a "real" book. The real sources used to write the book and publish it are put up on the web for free...

  • One useful place to ask this question (other than slashdot might be the Studio B mailing list.

    You can read the archives here: http://www.studiob.com/mailinglist.asp [studiob.com]

    A large number of technical book authors share their (sometimes insightful) views on the list.

    When I (co-)wrote PHP & MySQL Web Development [amazon.com] I found that mailing list really useful. From the archives, you can get a pretty good idea what issues other authors face.

  • why don't you just copyright the book and then make it freely available, with a statement like "you MAY copy any part of this book without obtaining the permission of the author, provided you give credit" etc etc..
  • geeks are not suppossed to reinvent the wheel.
  • English language (and all applications thereof) used without permission from its inventors, writers or copywriters. No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced and transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, especially including photocopying if it is done at the expense of some unsuspecting corporation. Other recommended methods include casting readings over pirate radio, reprinting tracts in unwary newspapers, and just signing your own name to this and publishing it as your own work. Any claim relating to copyright infringement, advocation of illegal activities, defamation of character, incitement to riot, treason, etc. should be addressed directly to your Congressperson as a military rather than civil issue.


    Did I mention that many of might want to pick up a copy of Days of Love, Nights of War? It's spectacular in ways I can't express :)

    bacchusrx.
  • Hi, my name is Carey Bunks, and I have written two OS books: Grokking the Gimp [gimp-savvy.com] and The Lasso: A Rational Guide to Trick Roping [juggling.org].

    Here are my two cents on writing books, and on the theory that community participation benefits a book in the same way it benefits code (correcting errors, keeping it up to date, etc). I suspect that this theory is wrong except for some special cases (for example, dictionaries). However, I can warmly recommend the idea of making a book open.

    I claim that writing a good book is very different than writing good code. Generally, good code should be well organized, carefully designed, with its components being as modular and as independent as possible. If successful, the result should be an application that evolves more gracefully, and is more easily updated and maintained by multiple developers.

    A good book should be well organized, however, does not, indeed must not be modular. Why? Because a human mind does not understand nor process the words in a book the way a computer does a program. Humans like good organization. However, the brain also needs association of ideas and redundancy. We humans like to see the connections between things, and we need to be constantly reminded.

    So, although a table of contents may be very organized, a good book contains chapters that are hardly modular. Good chapters should be rich with references to other parts of the book, showing how the ideas presented in different parts work together. Furthermore, chapters will often contain redundant recaps of other chapters, again showing how the pieces fit together. When there is enough of this type of self-referencing, it creates a synergy that helps readers better understand and better appreciate the material.

    My conclusion is that a book is more like a cathedral than a bazaar. It requires a master architect who conceives the original design, and then literally weaves the many threads together into a single whole. The very nature of the work resists participation or subsequent updating by third parties. Thus, trying to update chapters is likely to make a book incoherent as the relevancy of references and the synergy of ideas start to break down.

    Second, my theory on writing a good book is coherent with the above discussion. I believe that the most important process in writing a good book is re-reading and re-writing. It's kind of like refactoring of code, except instead of making the resulting book more modular, it makes it more connected. As the book starts to take form (near the end of the first draft), it is important to intensely review what has been written. This will give rise to all sorts of small scale revisions -- spelling, grammar, and sentence construction corrections. However, it also allows the author to revisit the overall connectedness of the work. Does the story hold together? Is it coherent? Does it provide insight into the underlying concepts presented by the book? This is the most valuable part of the revision process.

    Finally, let's face the facts. The way the publishing industry works, it is very difficult to make any money writing. There are some counter-examples to this, however, the overwhelming majority of books make less than $10k for their authors. Compared to the 6 to 9 months of full-time work needed to produce a quality book, you are better off not trying to write for a living. Thus, it is unlikely that deciding to make a book open will ruin its economic potential. However, in some cases, I think that making a book OS can help improve its market share (see my thoughts on this in this interview [lwn.net] on LWN). On the other hand, creating a book is a very rewarding personal experience, and can definitely improve ones professional profile.

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