Message: 1 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:58:32 +0100 From: "Peter Damian" peter.damian@btinternet.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia ideology To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: B5D73D52B61047D99DB70BB610E8F971@edwardPC Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original

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What license(s) will the book be released under? MZMcBride

Very funny :)

I have just completed my book on Scotus, which will be submitted to the Catholic University Assocation Press next week. Assuming it gets through their lengthy approval process,it will be published under whatever license they use - I imagine the 'evil' one.

So to for the Wikipedia book, but it is early days to approach a publisher.

If you ask why, I reply that no method has yet been devised to give attribution to the author of a work in a way that advances their career. I will earn little or no money from either work, I imagine. Note that Andrew Lih's book, which I have ordered from Waterstone's, is also under a standard copright license. At least I assume - I paid good money for it, because it was not available any other way.

However, I do publish material on my own website, the Logic Museum. I fund this myself, and the translation work such as here

http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Ockham/Summa_Logicae

is published under a 'free' license. http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/The_Logic_Museum:Copyrights

I don't get any formal recognition for this. I do it because I want this material, which is very hard to get access to, even for subject matter experts, to be freely available to everyone on the planet.

Edward

I don't see the question as humorous, nor indeed do I see non-free licences as evil. As a community we spend a lot of time making sure that the non-free copyrights that others have used are respected. But there is a default expectation here that when we ask for volunteers time, the end result will be released under a free license. So when someone asks for people to put time into something that won't be under a free license then I think that at the least one should be up front about that; and being upfront and open about it may even get people thinking about alternatives. We have very similar issues in the research area. Would it make it more difficult to publish your book if the arrangements were more like "The book will be published under a commercial license, and any "off the record" comments will remain so. But where the interviewee agrees, transcriptions of the interviews will be posted on ??????? within x months of the publication of the book."?

WeeSpielChequers