Perens, Prentice deliver Open Source books (Register) [LWN.net]

The Register covers Open Content-licensed books from Prentice Hall. "It works like this. Prentice sells the paper version for several months until an electronic version is released. What happens next is entirely up to the community. The author retains the copyright and in the standard license, his name must be appear on the book's cover. Citations must be acknowledged, modifications must be identified, and derivative works must identify the original unmodified source document."

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Perens, Prentice deliver Open Source books (Register)

Posted Jan 7, 2003 12:12 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Great news.

Glad they chose to use an approved[1] Free documentation license. The article didn't mention if either of the optional clauses of the Open Publication License will be excercised though.

Either one would render the documents non-free but it sounds like Pretence Hall are really trying to play along with the community so I doubt this will be a problem.

Nice one Bruce.

Ciaran O'Riordan
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeDocumentationLicenses

Perens, Prentice deliver Open Source books (Register)

Posted Jan 7, 2003 14:15 UTC (Tue) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link]

Glad they chose to use an approved Free documentation license. The article didn't mention if either of the optional clauses of the Open Publication License will be excercised though.

No - see this post, this post and this post from the Slashdot story.

Perens, Prentice deliver Open Source books (Register)

Posted Jan 7, 2003 15:50 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

> > The article didn't mention if either of the optional clauses of the Open
> > Publication License will be excercised though.
>
> No - see this post, this post and this post from the Slashdot story.

Correct, as I said, the *article* didn't mention the use of options.

Thanks for the links, I'm glad Perens won't be using the non-free options.

Also glad to hear that authors will have the option of using the GNU Free Documentation License.

The third post is pretty funny:
"there is a bug in the copyright page which I will fix in the electronic version, because someone didn't understand the OPL when putting together the copyright page. It goes to the trouble to say that you can use it under the OPL, and then after that says "no copying". Duh!"

Ciaran O'Riordan