On a related tack, I've been toying with the idea
of writing my NEXT book
as an open source project from start to finish. We would begin by posting a
chapter outline and letting anyone edit, contribute and annotate while we
write. Do you think this would work? Would it be possible to publish the
book commercially and get it into bookstores if the writing process took
place within a GNU framework? Would the GNU license be necessary to attract
collaborators?
Wow! That'd be really keen. With you and whoever else as editors and/or
primary authors, you'd obviously have veto power over what changes get
included, what changes get reversed, etc. If you managed to draw enough
people to the project, I can't even begin to imagine the possible quality of
the end result. When I'm reading books, I seem to find /all/ the typos,
misspellings, and punctuation errors. I guess most books don't get very
meticulous proofreadings (I have to read and digest every single word fairly
slowly when I read, so my reading of a book does equal an insanely
meticulous proofreading). Plus, I imagine such a project would likely
attract fairly intelligent individuals. Having a number of acute minds
contribute to the text would likely bring to the project more depth and
scope, with people suggesting nuances, perspectives, and angles that the
authors probably wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
I'd certainly be interested in meaningfully contributing. And if you
managed to advertise the project in the right channels, imagine the people
that might drop by to throw in their two cents: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Ralph Nader, Jello Biafra, Greg Palast, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti, RMS,
countless anti-globalization kiddies (I use 'kiddie' in a good sense here,
as I'm one of 'em), old peaceniks, numerous academics from around the world,
etc. I don't see how you could go wrong.
So long as a history of all changes is kept, and so long as the
authors/editors review all changes, I don't see how anything bad could come
of the venture. (The part about authors/editors reviewing all changes
shouldn't be too bad, as such a project certainly wouldn't have the volume
of contributions as Wikipedia.)
And I don't think a GNU license would specifically be necessary. I,
personally, would like to see a GNU license, 'cause I'm a big fan of RMS,
and I've been a GNU kiddie since I was 15 or so. But there are plenty of
good GPL-ish (or at least BSD-ish) licenses out there that people respect:
Open Content License, Open Publishing License, Artistic License, or roll
your own, etc.
Peace out,
Derek
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