Free and open source your documentation efforts

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi Gary, 
I am wondering whether it is a good idea to restrict use of the course data to "Noncommercial. The user may not use this work for commercial purposes."

I added a post by Markus addressing a similar question with respect to geodata.

We are a company and we provide services for money - thus fall into the category commercial. Nonetheless I (personally) strive to provide all our documentation, tutorial, etc. in best and up to date quality for free to use (as in free speech not beer). But I am always having a hard time explaining to people who actually create this training material why they should publish it for free use (they are employees, so they have to do it anyway but I like them to understand its the right thing to do). Their fear is that we damage our potential income possibilities. If good coursework is available for free online who would bother to come to our high pay individual classes? To answer this question we have identified three different user profiles of people who need documentation, coursework and training and evaluated our commercial interest in them:
* Self study
Some people are brilliant or have a lot of time. They just grab stuff, read trough it and are done (within days, weeks or years, depending on the mount of brilliance...). Those people would not pay our rates anyway and rather stumble through the code or software by themselves which will take a little longer. But in the end they will get a grip on it without our help so they are outside our commercial interest, or rather 'commercial outreach' :-). But if they run away and grab better (documented) software they actually damage more of our potential income. But if they can use good material their learning process will speed up and they will help propagate disseminate and foster FOSSGIS in the end probably also generating more business which in the end is good for all of us (this is long term thinking and not very business-like but why should we not change business thinking a bit while we are at it?). They might even know how much work the preparation of good course material is a
nd appreciate, recommend or even contribute to it.
* Universities
Courses run for several weeks, half a year, whatever. Students wont pay our rates either thus are also out of our (commercial) scope. Nonetheless students are (our) workers of tomorrow and we want them to be well educated (if only out of commercial interest). Having them download and use 'our' documentation thus does not harm our commercial interest either. 
* Folks with a pressing problem
They do not have the time to learn by themselves, left university long ago and need to get going within days to solve a particular problem. They have funds for training and they will come to us (and other regional businesses) and get somebody to teach them what they might have learned by themselves given the appropriate time. This is where we actually make money. 

OK, this is old crap, the old story, same thing applies to developing Free Software. If you have a problem you can choose to solve it yourself, wait until someone else does or pay someone to do it. So my above ideas are nothing new at all, its just the same concept applied to another form of 'code'. 

But if you restrict course work to non-commercial use you exclude all those fine professionals on creating new and enhancing existing material because they will not have any interest in producing something they can not use to pay their bills. On the other hand we (commercials) waste a lot of energy producing training material that will only be use to a few people who can afford it. Both does not make much sense. 

Best regards, 
Arnulf. 


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [OSGeodata] UNOSAT - Satellite Imagery for All
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:54:07 +0200
From: Markus Neteler <neteler.osgeo at gmail.com>
Reply-To: geodata at geodata.osgeo.org
To: geodata at geodata.osgeo.org
CC: geo-discuss at lists.okfn.org
References: <451869A6.6080204 at loskot.net>

Hi Mateusz,

I checked the site but didn't find a copyright statement.
It seems to be like "free beer", not freedom. Do you know
details?
Example test question: Could I use those data in a formal
training for which I get paid (so, this would be a sort of
commercial activity then)?

It would be good if UNOSAT added a clear data license.
Maybe you friend at CERN has some insights.

Best
Markus


On 9/26/06, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Some time ago I found UNOSAT project and today I reminded it as
> potential candidate of data provider in our Public Geo Data campaign.
>
> I believe it fits frames of OSGeo and Geodata very well:
>
> "UNOSAT is a United Nations programme created to provide the
> international community and developing countries with enhanced access to
> satellite imagery and Geographic Information System (GIS) services."
>
> Here is the website:
>
> http://unosat.web.cern.ch/unosat/
>
> Free maps:
>
> http://unosat.web.cern.ch/unosat/asp/prod_free.asp
>
> BTW, I'm not sure if this project is founded/lead by CERN in Geneve,
> but it's hosted in CERN place (see Contact link).
>
> I have a friend working in CERN and he told me there are some GIS
> projects founded by CERN, so may be CERN could be one of institutional
> partners collaborating with OSGeo / Geodata projects.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Cheers
> --
> Mateusz Loskot
> http://mateusz.loskot.net
>