From: Juergen Katins Date: 2002-07-01T17:49:29+09:00 Subject: Re: documentation licenses (was: eruby SAFE question) Tobias Reif wrote: >I suggest to all to boycott this translation of the PickAxe. Thank you for your appreciation of my work. I have spent a lot of time and some money to complete this translation. If this is the estimation for it I should advise anybody not to make any effort in free software. Use it but for heavens sake don't work for it! Tobias Reif wrote: >Dave Thomas wrote: >> I don't know if there is a way to prevent it, What happened is that >> someone in Germany translated the book and decided that they now owned >> the copyright to all the content >This most definitely is highly illegal, from what I know. This is absolutely legal. Think of other free books like those written by Horaz, Platon, Edgar Alan Poe. Nobody would ever take the trouble to translate them if he doesn't get the protection of copyright. james@rubyxml.com wrote: >I gather there is nothing to stop anybody from translating the English >version into German again, ... Nothing but the amount of work. David Alan Black wrote: >I base this view on the fact that Katins's translation does not >include the following notice, which the OPL stipulates must be >included with translations: > Copyright (c) by . This material > may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set > forth in the Open Publication License, vX.Y or later (the latest > version is presently available at > http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/). Ooops, I only copied the copyright notice that I found: "Extracted from the book "Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" Copyright � 2000 Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Released under the terms of the Open Publication License V1.0. This reference is available for download. " Tobias Reif wrote: >They clearly knowingly sabotaged a system of goodwill and stole >your works that you gave to the community. I am tired of all this lamentations about "He has stolen your work..", "The book is owned by ..." My considered opinion on free software / free publications is: 1. If you publish a free book it is just as Tobias says: you give it to the community. With it you loose your grip on it, you give away your rights (apart from personal rights like protection against disfiguration or incorrect citation). Nobody can steal something which is already given away. 2. If there is any owner at all it is the one maintaining the project/book, the one who is working to improve the quality and usability. Maintainance of a free online book could look like this: Missing paragraphs could be included, figures could be made available, page references could be made real working references instead of numbers pointing to pages not existing, and the omitted index could be included again. A free online book should not be the crippled version of the printed book. A free book should be more than the mere appetizer for the book's printed version.