Advocating the Open Publication License easier?

[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).

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/