RE: hold off until the copyright can be clarified

Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:

> I'd have to say hold off until the copyright questions can be
> resolved.  Not that I've ever had any trouble myself, but the
> horror stories out there really make you think twice...

What questions?

I got the impression that someone at the SchemeUK meeting may have raised
the spectre of lawsuits, but that makes no sense to me.  Selling a book
based on a compilation of LGPL material is certainly legal and within the
spirit of both the GPL and LGPL - every commercial Linux distribution does
exactly that.

The question is whether other people would have the right to copy that book
and sell it themselves.  Our agreement with contributors says they can't.
Anyone who wants to can try copying the book and selling it: in that case,
our publisher could choose to sue them.  Worst case, the publisher might
lose that suit for some reason.

So, what exactly is it we're worrying about?

> We discussed a BSD/MIT/X11 licensing approach at the SchemeUK meeting
> yesterday. I can't remember the details - can someone else provide a
> summary?

I'd love to hear them.  However, remember that the whole reason we're not
just putting an open license on the entire Cookbook as a compilaton is that
we want to be able to give a publisher some copyright protection.
BSD/MIT/X11 alone won't do that, afaict.

Anton



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