I haven't been on this mailing list much, but I do think there is a role and place for dual-licensed books to be both sought and worked on within the context of Wikibooks.
One thing that I think is reasonable to ask for is that the GFDL is one of the licenses that must be included. I don't think there is any dispute here.
The problem comes from those editors who decide to contribute to a wikibook, but for some reason or other explicitly don't want the "dual licensing" to continue. A great deal of this can and IMHO should be in some sort of policy guideline for the project.
There are some book projects that there are some very legitimate reasons for wanting to continue the dual-license. We've gone over before some of those book projects that want to be dual-licensed GPL/GFDL in order to ultimately include some GPL'd software into the book in some sort of final distro. I've also seen some books that were to be distributed with other items that were of some other free-type license (such as CC-by-SA or some other similar license). In these cases, maintaining the dual-licensing can be incredibly useful as we get the benefit of having the free content on Wikibooks, but the "end users" can also use the content in a completely different context.
I would hope that dual-licensing aren't completely dismissed from Wikibooks, and I especially would be abhorred by some "administrator" or other user randomly going through all of the current wikibooks and removing all mention of any dual-licensing content that currently exists. Such actions are IMHO contrary to a wiki spirit and this is something that should receive further debate... especially if such drastic actions are taking place.
More to the point, any changes that are irreversible (this is one of those type of changes) due to Wikibooks policy needs careful consideration.
All this said, the dual-licensing is something that should be decided when the book is established and is nearly impossible to change once multiple authors have contributed (in a significant manner) to its contents.
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The problem is that there is normally no proof that a certain user has agreed to dual-license their work. You can /say/ that something is GFDL/CC-by-sa but that doesn't make it so. You actually have to get people to explicitly agree to it, which I have not seen done in a satisfactory way. By "satisfactory" I really mean "legally acceptable" - this is not some arbitrary requirement I have invented.
Since that's the case, removing notices that a book is dual-licensed is perfectly legitimate - the book /isn't/ dual-licensed, it just claims to be. Unless there is proof that all other contributors have agreed to it explicitly, it is GFDL-only. There may be specific revisions which remain dual-licensed, but we cannot say with any degree of certainty that the book itself (ie the current version of all pages in the book) are multi-licensed.
I agree that multi-licensing is a good thing, but it has to be done right. Currently we have no acceptable method of doing so. Perhaps that will change in the future. Past attempts have unfortunately failed; if there is a case which has succeeded, I'd be happy to have it pointed out to me.
Mike
-----Original Message----- From: textbook-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:textbook-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of robert_horning@netzero.net Sent: August 14, 2008 8:58 PM To: textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Dual-licensed wikibooks
I haven't been on this mailing list much, but I do think there is a role and place for dual-licensed books to be both sought and worked on within the context of Wikibooks.
One thing that I think is reasonable to ask for is that the GFDL is one of the licenses that must be included. I don't think there is any dispute here.
The problem comes from those editors who decide to contribute to a wikibook, but for some reason or other explicitly don't want the "dual licensing" to continue. A great deal of this can and IMHO should be in some sort of policy guideline for the project.
There are some book projects that there are some very legitimate reasons for wanting to continue the dual-license. We've gone over before some of those book projects that want to be dual-licensed GPL/GFDL in order to ultimately include some GPL'd software into the book in some sort of final distro. I've also seen some books that were to be distributed with other items that were of some other free-type license (such as CC-by-SA or some other similar license). In these cases, maintaining the dual-licensing can be incredibly useful as we get the benefit of having the free content on Wikibooks, but the "end users" can also use the content in a completely different context.
I would hope that dual-licensing aren't completely dismissed from Wikibooks, and I especially would be abhorred by some "administrator" or other user randomly going through all of the current wikibooks and removing all mention of any dual-licensing content that currently exists. Such actions are IMHO contrary to a wiki spirit and this is something that should receive further debate... especially if such drastic actions are taking place.
More to the point, any changes that are irreversible (this is one of those type of changes) due to Wikibooks policy needs careful consideration.
All this said, the dual-licensing is something that should be decided when the book is established and is nearly impossible to change once multiple authors have contributed (in a significant manner) to its contents.
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On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 7:57 PM, robert_horning@netzero.net robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
One thing that I think is reasonable to ask for is that the GFDL is one of the licenses that must be included. I don't think there is any dispute here.
Nope, none whatsoever.
The problem comes from those editors who decide to contribute to a wikibook, but for some reason or other explicitly don't want the "dual licensing" to continue. A great deal of this can and IMHO should be in some sort of policy guideline for the project.
Yes, but I think this is just a small aspect of the larger problem. It's not just users who explicitly want GFDL-only, but also people who are lead to believe that Wikibooks is GFDL-only and edit a dual-licensed book without knowledge of it. The last thing that we need right now is to insist that all new editors familiarize themselves with the licensing intricacies of every single book before attempting an edit. Our barrier to entry is already high enough without demanding our editors navigate an uneven and haphazard legal landscape.
There are obviously some steps we could take to mediate this problem. If we altered the copyright notice at the bottom of the edit page, we could inform users that some books use more complicated licensing schemes then the default GFDL-only. However, even with warning there are people who aren't going to read that notice or understand it.
There are some book projects that there are some very legitimate reasons for wanting to continue the dual-license. We've gone over before some of those book projects that want to be dual-licensed GPL/GFDL in order to ultimately include some GPL'd software into the book in some sort of final distro. I've also seen some books that were to be distributed with other items that were of some other free-type license (such as CC-by-SA or some other similar license). In these cases, maintaining the dual-licensing can be incredibly useful as we get the benefit of having the free content on Wikibooks, but the "end users" can also use the content in a completely different context.
In the cases you mentioned, an aggregate could contain portions of content that are licensed separately. Think about how fair use excerpts are included in GFDL articles at Wikipedia. Or, think about how CC-BY-SA images are included in our books. Code snippets can be licensed separately, and we should find a way (special templates?) to support that more transparently.
I would hope that dual-licensing aren't completely dismissed from Wikibooks, and I especially would be abhorred by some "administrator" or other user randomly going through all of the current wikibooks and removing all mention of any dual-licensing content that currently exists. Such actions are IMHO contrary to a wiki spirit and this is something that should receive further debate... especially if such drastic actions are taking place.
This isn't something that is restricted to admins, any ordinary user could do it, and in a legally convincing manner. A dual license is an either-or affair: A reuser can choose one license or the other as their preference allows. All a user would need to do on a dual-licensed book is to make an edit that is GFDL-only, thus negating the second license.
Further, consider the potential pitfalls if a user decided to make a CC-BY-SA edit instead, thus negating the GFDL component of the dual-license. In a dual license, it's perfectly within the rights of the editor to select the second of the two licenses for their derivative. What a pickle we would be in if our books were all incompatible with each other.
All this said, the dual-licensing is something that should be decided when the book is established and is nearly impossible to change once multiple authors have contributed (in a significant manner) to its contents.
I'll reiterate my points: We risk creating an uneven landscape that is difficult to navigate. We risk raising the already formidable barrier to entry, asking new users to know and understand a myriad of licenses and license combinations.We run the risk of creating books that become legally incompatible with each other. +
As many opportunities and benefits as there are for flexible licensing schemes, I think we are far better served with a consistent and simple licensing scheme for now. The best I think we can do is to allow particular revisions to be flagged as dual-licensed, if all contributions previous to that revision are likewise licensed. This, of course, raises a certain amount of confusion in and of itself, and might be untenable for long-term ubiquitous use.
I just don't see how the additional flexibility we gain from this offsets all the other potential problems inherent in it.
--Andrew Whitworth
Hm...
I recently took part in a FLOSS Manuals Inkscape documentation booksprint. Since my Inkscape knowledge is nothing special, I wrote a guide to contributing to Wikimedia Commons, in theory the manual being for people who were already familiar with Inkscape but not Wikimedia. http://en.flossmanuals.net/wikimediacommons
FLOSS Manuals is by default GPL. I asked for this manual to be dual-licensed with the GFDL so that its contents could be copied to a Wikimedia wiki if desired.
I was thinking I should copy the whole thing to Wikibooks as a book, but I wouldn't want to do that if the content couldn't be fed back into FLOSS Manuals (which has a wiki-to-print process that actually works, *now*).
GFDL did not win the free license race. It seems to me if you cut off dual licensing you are cutting off a lot of potential partnerships.
Is it so bad if you just put a template on each page of the book stating its dual license? This is what http://mediawiki.org does, which has a namespace of help docs which are PD, and intended to be exported with every wiki. All the rest is GFDL which just stays at mediawiki.org. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:PD_Help_Page
cheers Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]
Hi all, I signed up for the list just recently and my interest is in finding schools - K-12 schools in the U.S., preferably Michigan - that are using open textbooks.
Is anyone keeping track, trying to keep track, of actual usage of open textbooks?
Thanks
Allen
Honestly, I would be surprised if there were any such schools using open textbooks. This whole movement is still very young, and there aren't a lot of books yet that are in high-quality condition. Even when a book is found that is high-quality, it is singular and not part of a larger collection. Schools tend to like to get all their books from a single source, and don't want to have to pick and choose the best books from a dozen or more sites.
Wikibooks obviously doesn't have many books that are currently usable in a classroom, maybe not any depending on the particular requirements teachers have. We have books with lots of prose but with few examples/problems. Things like that are going to keep us from being adopted by schools.
However, we do have things coming through soonish, like automatic PDF export and flagged revisions that will increase our appeal to schools. Of course, whether or not we can market that is a different story.
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Allen Majorovic amajorov@yahoo.com wrote:
Hi all, I signed up for the list just recently and my interest is in finding schools - K-12 schools in the U.S., preferably Michigan - that are using open textbooks.
Is anyone keeping track, trying to keep track, of actual usage of open textbooks?
Thanks
Allen
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Using a template on each page is a step in the right direction, but it is still questionable whether that is acceptable legally. /Assuming it is/, other issues arise. What if we want to move a page into the book? That page is not dual-licensed (or maybe & this is what Andrew was getting at -- licensed in some totally different way) and so ruins the dual licensing for the whole book. Furthermore, Wikibooks is openly advertised as being GFDL(-only) - mediawiki.org is openly advertised as having a PD Help: namespace. For them, the problems raised by moving content around isn't really relevant, as the help pages stand alone. But for us, it raises huge logistical concerns.
My biggest problem here is that we cannot force anyone to license their work under anything but the GFDL. So if someone doesn't want to also use cc-by-sa or PD or whatever, we can't say "Then you may not contribute to this book"
Wikibooks is for GFDL-licensed textbooks - I understand the rationale for expanding that, but I think it may cause more problems than it solves. That said, I'd love to see effort put into methods of doing this properly (ie not repeating the probably-invalid attempts of the past)
Mike
-----Original Message----- From: textbook-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:textbook-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brianna Laugher Sent: August 14, 2008 11:06 PM To: Wikimedia textbook discussion Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Dual-licensed wikibooks
Hm...
I recently took part in a FLOSS Manuals Inkscape documentation booksprint. Since my Inkscape knowledge is nothing special, I wrote a guide to contributing to Wikimedia Commons, in theory the manual being for people who were already familiar with Inkscape but not Wikimedia. http://en.flossmanuals.net/wikimediacommons
FLOSS Manuals is by default GPL. I asked for this manual to be dual-licensed with the GFDL so that its contents could be copied to a Wikimedia wiki if desired.
I was thinking I should copy the whole thing to Wikibooks as a book, but I wouldn't want to do that if the content couldn't be fed back into FLOSS Manuals (which has a wiki-to-print process that actually works, *now*).
GFDL did not win the free license race. It seems to me if you cut off dual licensing you are cutting off a lot of potential partnerships.
Is it so bad if you just put a template on each page of the book stating its dual license? This is what http://mediawiki.org does, which has a namespace of help docs which are PD, and intended to be exported with every wiki. All the rest is GFDL which just stays at mediawiki.org. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:PD_Help_Page
cheers Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]
2008/8/15 mike.lifeguard mike.lifeguard@gmail.com:
Using a template on each page is a step in the right direction, but it is still questionable whether that is acceptable legally.
Do we even know that putting a notice below the edit box that says "you must license your contribs as GFDL" is "acceptable legally"?
It's probably not. I mean we only just had the first ever court case that basically said "yes, open content licenses are a proper license".
Virtually everything we do is in uncharted legal territory. I don't think that's a strong reason to stop doing stuff.
My biggest problem here is that we cannot force anyone to license their work under anything but the GFDL. So if someone doesn't want to also use cc-by-sa or PD or whatever, we can't say "Then you may not contribute to this book"
How can we "force" anyone to do anything? It's always been, "play by our rules and your contribs are welcome. If not, see you later." And that is true for legal things like GFDL and merely community norms like NPOV or even a Manual of Style. What is wrong with having a community norm that if a book is stated as being dual-licensed, other editors must contribute to the book under the same set of licenses?
cheers Brianna
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
How can we "force" anyone to do anything? It's always been, "play by our rules and your contribs are welcome. If not, see you later." And that is true for legal things like GFDL and merely community norms like NPOV or even a Manual of Style. What is wrong with having a community norm that if a book is stated as being dual-licensed, other editors must contribute to the book under the same set of licenses?
This still ignores the possibility that some combinations of licenses will have a chilling effect on the pool of contributors. An unpopular license combination, or one that is overly confusing could stunt the growth of a book prematurely. Conversely, I dont see a benefit in terms of contributorship that multi-licensing will bring. If we demand one of the two licenses in a multilicensed scheme be GFDL, then we aren't going to expand our pool of potential donations at all.
I'm still seeing, and I dont think anybody has addressed this point yet, that we are trading ease-of-use at Wikibooks for increased ease-of-use elsewhere. We're bringing complexity to our site and our community in exchange for increased simplicitly elsewhere. And, to marginalize it further, we have thousands of books already which are GFDL-only and cannot be relicensed. The number of books we do have are going to be limited to a relatively small number which are to be created with the possibility that their editing communities will be limited because of license complexity.
I just don't see us as being at a level of maturity and stability where we can afford to be making things harder for ourselves for some amorphous benefit in reuse at other places. Most of our books simply aren't mature enough that they are worth being reused in other places yet anyway. Plus (and as a software guy, Rob should understand this too) we open up a window where changes made by downstream reusers cannot be brought back upstream to benefit our books and our communities. People can make derivatives of our works in such a way that Wikibooks cannot reuse and benefit from those derivatives. This is a violation of the very spirit of the GFDL and other "share alike" copyleft licenses, even if it's not a violation of the word of the licenses.
Somebody please show that I am wrong, but the more I think about this issue the more pessimistic I become about it.
--Andrew Whitworth
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