discuss: My obsolete HOWTOs being sold as a book
Subject:
Re: My obsolete HOWTOs being sold as a book
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
27 Feb 2001 07:50:04 -0000
Message-Id: <20010226232243.C158@lafn.org>
On Sat, Feb 24, 2001 at 10:52:13AM -0600, Patrick K. O'Brien wrote:
> FYI, here is a segment from the Linux Install HOWTO by esr. Sounds like the
> kind of notice you were looking for. HTH.
>
> ---
> 10. Administrivia
> 10.1. Terms of Use
> This document is copyright 1998 by Eric S. Raymond. You may use,
> disseminate, and reproduce it freely, provided you:
> * Do not omit or alter this copyright notice (you may translate it)
> * Do not omit or alter or omit the version number and date.
> * Do not omit or alter the document's pointer to the current WWW version.
> * Clearly mark any condensed, altered or versions as such.
> These restrictions are intended to protect potential readers from stale or
> mangled versions. If you think you have a good case for an exception, ask
> me.
>
This helps but there's still a major problem since most readers
browsing for info will never see this. Searching using a search
engine often takes you to a large document and you only read the part
of it that covers your topic. You don't bother to read the whole
document.
One could require in the license that if you distribute it on the
Internet, then you must provide the latest version. Except that if
you distribute stale versions you must mark any links to them as stale
and also note this at the start of the doc. Old versions are of both
historical interest and could possibly cover old hardware/software not
covered in newer versions.
One could even require that access to a stale version be via a dialog
box where one must click on "OK, I want to read/download the stale
version". One might define "stale" as anything out-of-date by more
than a week. This would mean for example that the Debian distribution
would need to create a new Debian packages weekly:-) But then what
about CDROM images of Linux distribution? Would all Linux
distributions need to be released weekly?:-) And what about authors
that submit their doc to the LDP a few weeks after the date on it? Or
people like me who fail to give the day in the date?
Such restrictions wouldn't affect the mirror sites, but would likely
reduce the number of other sites. There would still remain more than
enough sites. One current problem is that it's not too easy to find
the mirror sites using commercial search engine sites such AltaVista,
Google, and Yahoo. Most of the sites that turn up in searches are
commercial sites since they promote these sites with search engines.
I'm wondering how well we promote our sites. Many commercial search
engines on the Internet rely mainly on people filling in forms so that
sites will be listed. Is anyone doing this for LDP or it's mirrors?
So there are a lot of problems in including this and other
restrictions in a license. The resulting license becomes overly long.
Another way to fight stale docs is to contact sites that have our
stale docs. If they fail to change, then write to the sponsors. If
this still fails, then put the sponsors and their products in a
boycott list and put this list on all our mirror sites and other Linux
sites. State that we will cease this boycott when either:
1. They cease sponsoring the site that carries stale docs.
2. The site starts keeping it's docs current.
It might be easier to concoct a license to cover the stale-doc
situation than to go thru all the work involved in boycotting. And
boycotting might not be very effective.
David Lawyer
