Hi,
To recapitulate: asking a professor to change their courses from the traditional copyright-notice to the FDL, causes him or his staff the extra work of creating an online version, which in almost all cases does not exist now.
To put it frankly, it comes down to this: (Of course I wouldn't put it in an email this blunt:)
"Dear Professor, Could you please change the copyright-notice to the FDL. And could you add some cover-texts that has to be on the book if some publisher prints your course commercially without paying you any royalties which he's then very much allowed to do. And could please download and install OpenOffice. And could please load your Word-file into Openoffice and save that in an open and transparant format. And could you check that all of the conversion of your 200-page syllabus went OK. And could you put that file in your ftp-directory . And could you write in your text-book that anyone can download it from there. And could leave that file there for at least one year. Thank you very much."
Quite some demands, not? Is the FDL in such cases to big a step to take at once?
Wouldn't be more succesfull (on a quantitative scale) to advocate the Open Publication License for university-syllabusses? http://opencontent.org/openpub/ The only thing they have to do then is change the copyright-notice. Right? I can imagine that quite some people don't like the commercial redistribution by publishers without receiving any royalties. They will probably refuse to switch to the FDL. Instead of sticking to the traditional very restrictive notice, they can choose option B of the OPL, that prohibits commercial publication.
I don't really see objections in this option B, since it is more like an industrial regulation, not affecting small distributors like students and non-profit-organisations, giving a lot more freedom to users then traditional copyright-notices.
The Open Content License, on the contrary, prohibits asking a fee for the copies. This renders it useless if courses are distributed by student-organisations.
What do you think?
Wouter Vanden Hove
Wouter Vanden Hove Wouter.Vanden.Hove@pandora.be wrote:
Could you please change the copyright-notice to the FDL.
Has to be done for any copyright change.
And could you add some cover-texts that has to be on the book if some publisher prints your course commercially without paying you any royalties which he's then very much allowed to do.
Bah, royalties are not worth much. A few meagre % of the sale price, but promotions etc are billed out of that. Far better to sell the book yourself at a more favourable price.
And could please download and install OpenOffice. And could please load your Word-file into Openoffice and save that in an open and transparant format. And could you check that all of the conversion of your 200-page syllabus went OK.
That should be done anyway. Otherwise, they may lose their book.
And could you put that file in your ftp-directory . And could you write in your text-book that anyone can download it from there.
That's just your requirements, isn't it?
And could leave that file there for at least one year. [...]
Is that required? (Sorry, I should know, I know.)
Wouldn't be more succesfull (on a quantitative scale) to advocate the Open Publication License for university-syllabusses?
No. The Open Publication License has its own problems. The optional parts have the ability to make the licence very nasty indeed, either prohibiting modification or discriminating against certain uses.
The only thing they have to do then is change the copyright-notice. Right?
Wrong. They still need to convert the book to a useful format.
I can imagine that quite some people don't like the commercial redistribution by publishers without receiving any royalties.
It is normal that commercial publishers will want modifications to the book. Under the plain OPL, they cannot use the original author's name to promote a modified version, unless it was modified by that author. In that case, they are likely to ask the original author to do them as part of a publishing deal, aren't they?
If they want to print an unedited copy, then the author didn't have to do any more work, so it's no loss if they get no extra money. They were doing the work anyway and were probably paid by the university to do it.
They will probably refuse to switch to the FDL. Instead of sticking to the traditional very restrictive notice, they can choose option B of the OPL, that prohibits commercial publication.
I don't really see objections in this option B, since it is more like an industrial regulation, not affecting small distributors like students and non-profit-organisations, giving a lot more freedom to users then traditional copyright-notices.
Pardon? Non-profit organisations can still engage in commercial activity, such as offering a for-fee book printing service. The OPL+B prevents them from printing those books. In fact, it is hard to see how any OPL+B work can be printed legally through a print-on-demand service without asking for special permission.
The Open Content License, on the contrary, prohibits asking a fee for the copies. This renders it useless if courses are distributed by student-organisations.
OPL+option and OCL are both flawed, IMO.
MJR
And could please download and install OpenOffice. And could please load your Word-file into Openoffice and save that in an open and transparant format.
That is not required. If all you want is just meet the requirements, plain ASCII is perfectly suitable. Even MS Word can save as plain text. You lose the formating but you can distribute opaque copies (word.doc) printed with the formatting and have the transparent ugly plain text somewhere in the ftp repository, or just on a floppy distributed with the printed copy (of course, it is worth a charge, and the FDL allows you to ask for this charge).
Imagine now that a third party is willing to do the extra work that you do not want to ask your professors to do to have a transparent copy with a formatting similar to opaque copies. It may be a student, for example. As it is FDL, he is free to do so. So he can take the transparent plain text copy to start the job with any generic text editor and have a printed copy to see the formatting he has to reproduce in his favorite transparent file format that allows such formatting (may it be LaTeX, Texinfo, Docbook...).
Utopistic? Bah, if no one is willing to do the extra work it probably means that the publication is not worth it. But no one can complain that he cannot. If someone complains that he has no sophisticated usefull transparent copy, he just has to make one by himself.
Guillaume Ponce http://www.guillaumeponce.org/
Op vr 19-07-2002, om 09:57 schreef Guillaume Ponce: > And could please download and install OpenOffice. > And could please load your Word-file into Openoffice and save that in an > open and transparant format.
That is not required. If all you want is just meet the requirements, plain ASCII is perfectly suitable. Even MS Word can save as plain text. You lose the formating but you can distribute opaque copies (word.doc) printed with the formatting and have the transparent ugly plain text somewhere in the ftp repository, or just on a floppy distributed with the printed copy (of course, it is worth a charge, and the FDL allows you to ask for this charge).
In the FDL: "...or state in or with each Opaque copy a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a COMPLETE Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material"
If you save a World-file as ascii, then how does an integral from 1 to infinity look like? Word does contain an equation editor, doesn't it ? I have some courses with a lot of equations, which certainly don't look like TeX,everything points in the direction of Word-made.
Saving that file as ascii, you not only loose the formatting, but probably a substantial part of the CONTENT as well. And what about all the graphics?
I'm afraid that saving as ascii will not be sufficient to have "a COMPLETE Transparent copy". The Open Publication License doesn't have a requirement like this.
Wouter
Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
Op vr 19-07-2002, om 09:57 schreef Guillaume Ponce:
And could please download and install OpenOffice. And could please load your Word-file into Openoffice and save that in an open and transparant format.
That is not required. If all you want is just meet the requirements, plain ASCII is perfectly suitable. Even MS Word can save as plain text. You lose the formating but you can distribute opaque copies (word.doc) printed with the formatting and have the transparent ugly plain text somewhere in the ftp repository, or just on a floppy distributed with the printed copy (of course, it is worth a charge, and the FDL allows you to ask for this charge).
In the FDL: "...or state in or with each Opaque copy a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a COMPLETE Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material"
If you save a World-file as ascii, then how does an integral from 1 to infinity look like? Word does contain an equation editor, doesn't it ? I have some courses with a lot of equations, which certainly don't look like TeX,everything points in the direction of Word-made.
Saving that file as ascii, you not only loose the formatting, but probably a substantial part of the CONTENT as well. And what about all the graphics?
<snip>
And so the problem remains. You can try to use openoffice to convert the document, but chances are it won't recognize the extensions in the doc format that the equation editor uses. End result: the professors will have to be convinced to write their courses using another format or a student (or a group of students) will have to do it themselves and verify the entire copy manually. Needless to say that would be a lot of work (almost like writing the damn thing yourself)
my 2 cents, Wim
Wouter Vanden Hove Wouter.Vanden.Hove@pandora.be wrote:
If you save a World-file as ascii, then how does an integral from 1 to infinity look like? Word does contain an equation editor, doesn't it ? I have some courses with a lot of equations, which certainly don't look like TeX,everything points in the direction of Word-made.
OK, these are maths courses? That's news. Well, if they're using Word for such important data, they need hitting with the pointy sticks before they get too far down that path and slide towards data loss. I'm not sure whether OpenOffice.org is good at converting the equations. Has anyone tried it? All my lecturers used TeX, as far as I remember.
Anyway, in the worst case, maybe you can convince them to slowly move over and write new material in a transparent format? That's essential for almost any copyleft to be used properly, I think.