> I propose that the news.answers team
> accept only FAQ's that agree with the following license:
News.answers moderators should allow FAQ maintainers to use whatever
license they wish, so long as certain minimum standards for
distribution are met. Your proposal goes beyond minimum standards, and
your wording is too vague. The sentence quoted above, for example,
suggests that your license would be the only license allowed for
FAQ postings.
Your proposal might be a suggested license, but it has to be
voluntary, much like the GNU GPL is voluntary. Minimum standards for
news.answers distribution should be limited to giving rtfm permission
to include the FAQ in the FAQ repository and allowing readers of the
newsgroup to use the FAQ for personal use. In other words, just those
rights that are necessary for news.answers and rtfm to operate.
Anything else, such as allowing anybody to redistribute the FAQ,
especially modified redistribution, should NOT be a requirement. (I
can just imagine some company sticking a glowing review into one of my
FAQs and redistributing it.)
In fact, if I so wish, I should retain the right to prevent anybody
from redistributing my FAQs for profit. Just because I give you the
right to redistribute my FAQ for free doesn't mean I give you the
right to redistribute it for money. That some outfits currently make
money off of newsfeeds (or even provide for-fee newsfeeds on CD-ROM)
doesn't mean it's right. If you're going to make money off of one of
my FAQs, I expect you to have the courtesy of asking me for
permission. (Claims that one isn't charging for the FAQ but for the
distribution are just so much hogwash -- if folks weren't interested
in what was being distributed, they wouldn't be willing to pay the
distribution fee.)
For example, in addition to adding an explicit copyright statement to
most of my FAQs, I'm adding a license that permits non-profit
redistribution, but requires for-profit redistribution to ask for
permission. I'm thinking of going one step further, and requiring any
for-profit redistribution to donate 10% of their profits to the Free
Software Foundation (or some equivalent). If you're going to leech off
of my work, the least you can do is contribute something back to the
community.
Mark Kantrowitz
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved