On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 12:41 PM, darklama darklama@gmail.com wrote:
Having the FSF involved in writing a book might be a good start to clarifying requirements Wikibooks and other projects need to follow to be compliant. However I am hoping for something more. Like a took to automatically generate the necessary attributions for inclusion in a book in a way that makes it clear who did what under what licensing terms. This involves needing to answer the question of what's not enough and what's too much information?
Ah, the ever wished-for technical solution. This is a problem not just for Wikibooks but for all WMF projects. There just plain isn't an easy automated way to extract information about the contribution history into an easy-to-print format. GFDL does require we attribute our authors, and at the moment we (the royal "we" for all WMF contributors) are hoping that our difficult-to-parse history pages satisfy this requirement.
Getting attribution information for authors, both authors of content and images, included into our distributable versions (PDF and Print versions) is a must, for the GFDL or any other copyleft license that we use. This is a feature that we should demand be included in the PDF extension that is being tested right now. I agree with darklama that we can't really move forward on any issue until this most basic requirement is satisfied from a technical perspective.
One possible solution to this could be to take the same attitude towards media as some would like to take towards dual licensing books. Require that at a minimum all media must be licensed under the GFDL or allow relicensing under the GFDL only.
Here I think is my biggest objection, and I think I've been unable to describe it properly heretofore. Dual licenses are typically either-or situations, options are presented and the reuser may select one, the other, or both at their discretion. What we would have to do on Wikibooks to allow dual-licensing of books is not only to specify what licenses were the available options, but also we must mandate additional terms: That the entire multi-licensing scheme must be preserved on Wikibooks for compatibility, that reusers may select either-or license (except reusers on Wikibooks itself).
Imagine that we have a book that is GFDL+CC-BY-SA-3.0. Content reusers on a different website take our book, make modifications to it, and release the book under the GFDL only. Now, those changes cannot be folded back into our book because the contributions do not allow CC-BY-SA-3.0. We then lose access to changes made to our content downstream, the exact situation that copyleft licenses try to prevent. In the case we have now our content is always GFDL, downstream derivatives are always GFDL, users and reusers always have to use the GFDL, everything works seemlessly.
Another solution is to just have a tool to generate the attributions for all media used in a book. Question though is what is needed to attribute media used in a book? The media filenames aren't necessarily going to be included with every use of the media within the book to make it easy to associate license with media. Does this mean in order to acknowledge the contributors of a media and the license used that the media would need to be a literal part of the attribution? Does every media that uses the same license still need a separate attribution? Would separate attributions be needed if the book and all media used in the book used the same license? Would this still be a problem if the book and all the media in the book used the same license?
Great questions, all. I submit for the consideration of all discussion participants now some of the work I've attempted to do on the [[Control Systems]] book. Take a look at this page, for reference:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/Licensing
This is the most that I've seen in any book to try and satisfy the differing license requirements of our books and our image media, and it still isn't enough. For most licenses, we would need to include attribution lists not just for the pages in the text, but also the images. Some other licenses also require that we include the text of those licenses with their respective images in the distributed copy of the book.
What we really need is something to standardize and automate this process. Some kind of MediaWiki-based technical solution would be ideal for this, but some kind of extension or JavaScript or whatever would be fine too.
--Andrew Whitworth