[OSGeo-Edu] Free and open source your documentation efforts

[Arnulf Christl]

On Sat, October 7, 2006 22:01, Przemys³aw Bojczuk wrote:
> Arnulf Christl wrote:
>
>> 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."
> (...)
>> 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.
>
> I'm not sure which non-commercial licence you are talking about here,
> but for example Creative Commons NonCommercial makes a lot of sense.
> When you publish your work under this licence (let's say
> Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) it means nobody *but you* can
> take it and sell it, but it *doesn't* restrain you from making money
> from it. It means your work will be freely distributable among
> self-study people and university people etc., but you will still be able
> to print it and sell it (in any form) and make money from it.

So it does actually not solve my problem. All commercial enterprises will
need to prepare their own training material and not be able to share what
has already been done. So again we are reinventing the wheel. Additionally
no commercial enterprise will be able to tap on the stuff that has been
produced at universities and thus will also not enhance it. There is no
point in doing that.

> So using CC NonCommercial license actually solves both problems
> stated in your last thought: it helps people who decide to
> publish their work for free to retain their copyrights and it
> should encourage the commercial creators to share their work with
> people who wouldn't pay for it anyway.
>
> I hope that clarified some things for you.

Clarified yes, but it does not solve the problem. The non-commercial
restriction prevents us from getting things together as well as they
could. The problem is that we make money not by selling the material (how
much will anybody pay for course material) but for the actual teaching and
training, providing for space and infrastructure. The price that we can
get out of selling the course material does not pay for the work that goes
into it.

Probably one of the problems is that in some legislations the term
'copyright' comprises both the rights of the originator of a work and the
rights for commercial exploitation. In some legislations (most Europeans)
there is a clear distinction which helps to clarify the rather messy
combined term of 'copyright'. Additionally it is not possible to strip the
originator's 'creator' rights from his or her work, only the commercial
exploitation rights can be transferred to another entity.

> Best regards,
> Przemys³aw Bojczuk
>
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-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de