"But the book is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, which means that the LaTeX source is also available"

Posted Mar 3, 2012 11:31 UTC (Sat) by John_Doe (guest, #76040)
In reply to: "But the book is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, which means that the LaTeX source is also available" by bros
Parent article: Book review: Open Advice

> it's getting updated as soon as there is a change

And you consider that an ... advantage? Here's a thought for you:

> "For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened."

Source: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/3.html

"But the book is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, which means that the LaTeX source is also available"

Posted Mar 3, 2012 14:14 UTC (Sat) by bros (subscriber, #75198) [Link] (1 responses)

> "It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened."

Good point. I should have mentioned, that I'm referring to writing technical books mainly. Now that I think about this more, freezing the book at some point might be a good thing to do too.

Thanks for your comment.

"But the book is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license, which means that the LaTeX source is also available"

Posted Apr 15, 2012 2:03 UTC (Sun) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

Imho, updating is great - picking particular snapshots for "release" is also great (whether releases like in software, or marking and emphasizing certain versions like the German Wikipedia). I guess I can even see books where it might be sensible to prevent the marking of further releases. Deleting the changelog and VCS history (or set of diffs, or in the case of physical books - destroying the old versions) is not great, which is what was done in 1984.