Sanford Forte wrote:
This is a good idea. The only limitation I can see is as follows. Let's say that WP creates a geometry text, in modular format. There are 100 modules...7 of the modules are GNU-limited. This would require that those 7 modules have alternate modules for that material, especially if it was crucial to the whole geometry curriculum for that grade.
Not really.
It's useful to separate GNU-limited material from the freer stuff while it's being written on the Wikimedia site. But that doesn't matter so much in a printed textbook; anybody that wants to modify the printed textbook will find it easiest to come to Wikimedia to do so. So if the printed version is entirely GNU FDL, then that's OK, so long as Wikimedia has the ability to license the 93 other modules some other way if that should be desired later on. Only /then/ -- when we need to license 93 modules under (say) CC-BY-SA, do the 7 GNU modules disappear. But that would be for a different book.
I can just see a sales representative form Prentice Hall (all the way up to the CEO of that company's textbook division) wining and dining textbook committee people from various states and bringing stuff like this up just before crucial votes are cast to accept or not accept certain books for district consideration.
They'll bring up all kinds of nonsense about copyleft. But if we must, especially at first, present a GNU book, then that's OK -- the GNU FDL is used for lots of books (mostly software manuals) that are highly regarded and well used, so ours can be like that too. A disjunctive licence, or granting relicensing rights to Wikimedia, lets us make the source available to people using CC (or whatever), but even a GNU printed book is much freer than anything from Prentice-Hall.
-- Toby