RE: Licences

David Van Horn wrote:
> I can buy a copy of Gulliver's Travels at my local bookstore,
> despite the fact that it is a work in the public domain and
> freely available on the web from Project Gutenberg.

Books like that are known quantities in all sorts of ways - the market
already knows them, the publisher has some sense of what the demand for the
book is likely to be, and even how much competition from other publishers
they're likely to have.

IMO, the O'Reilly compilation copyright gives some sense of the minimum that
a mainstream publisher is likely to be comfortable with.  Assuming that's
true, how important it is depends on how much we care about having the
option to use a mainstream publisher.  For all we know right now, mainstream
publishers might not be interested in a Scheme Cookbook.

BTW, didn't Matthias Felleisen say he could put us in touch with a
publisher?  Do we know which one(s) he had in mind?

> > So, I don't think that reserving the exclusive right to a specific
> > compilation is non-free, if other compilations are not
> > prevented.  If that's acceptable and agreed on, we could probably
> > make the statement say that more explicitly, or perhaps do that
> > in a separate FAQ related to the copyright.
>
> Yes, but which compilation are you reserving the exclusive right
> to?  One that you will deem to be "the" compilation at some future
> point in time long after authors have submitted and agreed to the
> (incomplete) license agreement?

OK, how about this: the Schematics copyright applies to any compilation
assembled based on the classification currently made via the CookbookForm.
In other words, other compilations could be made as long as they didn't make
use of the Topic Type, the Parent Topic (e.g. section or chapter it belongs
to), or the Topic Order, i.e. its sequence within its parent.

Additionally, as I said, pages which are considered specific to the
compilation could be marked with the compilation copyright, which will make
it clear on an ongoing basis which parts of the Cookbook are non-free.  That
would include the table of contents, all chapter pages, and perhaps a few
others.

An aspect of the above which might need to be made clear is that when
contributors classify their own contributions via the CookbookForm, they are
essentially doing free work - albeit minimal - towards the compilation, and
relinquishing their rights to that work.

> In the end, I would rather see a free license detract from the
> commercial success of the book, rather than the commercial sucess
> of the book detract from the free disemenation, derivation, and
> reproduction of the material, which in turn would detract from
> contributions and impact of the work.
> Although I'm not convinced these are mutually exclusive concerns.

I'm hoping they're not mutually exclusive.  BTW, I'm not so much concerned
with "commercial success" as in being able to *attempt* widespread
distribution.  If a commercial publisher accepts a book and pushes it out to
bookstores, but it doesn't sell, I can live with that, although the
publisher won't like it.

Anton



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