[OSGeo-Edu] Getting Started on the Free GIS Book...

[Charlie Schweik]

Dear all,

Regarding our curriculum material, I was planning on using the license
described below (NC) but I think Jo is convincing me to go with the
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license now.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Finally, like Gary, I'd be happy to contribute our material to this book
as well. January will be a sprint month for us as the online course will
begin in late January. I am splitting "lectures" on the WebCT platform
(our UMass online platform) but the course wiki will have the
attribution-sharealike modules (exercises and homeworks) that we will be
contributing to the OSGeo effort. We also have one semester long
"generic project" on identifying parcels for conservation we have used
in our regular ArcGIS course that we hope to convert to a QGIS/Grass
exercise and we will make that available.

Charlie


On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 10:02 -0800, Jo Walsh wrote:
> dear Tyler, Landon, all
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 09:46:07AM -0800, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> > >[3] What license will we use to release the material of book? I was  
> > >thinking about the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share  
> > >Alike 2.5 License. You can find details about the license here:  
> > >http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/25/
> > I'd have to dig up the archives to see if we agreed on something  
> > around this.  We talked a fair bit about Charlie's own curriculum and  
> > how/why it could be licensed certain ways.  From my angle, one thing  
> > to keep in mind is that any 'non-commercial' clause can actually kill  
> > some good use of the material. 
> 
> NC doesn't rule out commercial use of the material though, just *under
> the terms of this license*. You could still have a "dual licensing" 
> type model like MySQL's: http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html
> 
> Having said this, if this were a democracy I would be in favour of
> removing a commercial reuse restriction. If a publishing company wants
> to print a tree edition of this text - isn't that a success? Would a
> print-on-demand edition through an outfit like lulu.com be an option
> for OSGeo to print this and make a small profit for the Foundation?
> 
> http://blog.okfn.org/2006/04/24/removing-the-nc/ is a writeup by Rufus
> Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation about the problems NC clauses
> can cause. FWIW OpenStreetmap has no NC clause for its data. It *is*
> ShareAlike though and that can be a good option - if commercial
> publishers make improvements they have to be released under the same
> license terms... 
> 
> > For example, I worked with one or two  
> > others a couple years ago to produce a data access manual for  
> > MapServer, for a workshop we were running.  I included this as an  
> > appendix in my Web Mapping Illustrated book, because it was a very  
> > good reference for the audience in the book.  Re-writing material  
> > that I'd already contributed to didn't make sense and the other  
> > authors had no problems with it.  Was that commercial use?
> 
> Yes, "it's commercial when money changes hands".
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> jo
> 
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-- 
Associate Professor 
- Department of Natural Resources Conservation (www.umass.edu/nrc) 
- Center for Public Policy and Administration (www.masspolicy.org),
- Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government (www.ncdg.org)
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
Phone: (413) 545-1824
Website: http://people.umass.edu/cschweik