[ZDP] OpenContent issues

[Martijn Faassen]

David Ascher wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 17 May 1999, Michel Pelletier wrote:
[snip discussion on Zope book]

Woah, let's all calm down for a bit -- the ZDP is writing a lot, but
we're not anywhere close to a publishable book, and it's even
questionable that's a goal at all; though of course I'm not excluding
anything here, which I why I made this maniacal remark about
bestsellers. Let's refrain from contacting O'Reilly right now, I
suggest. :)

What I do think we should do is figure out the copyright issues -- we're
collaboratively working on documentation, and we need to figure out on
what kind of legal structure we're basing this. Primarily we need a
legal structure that:

* Allows collaboration on documentation on the Internet without hassles.
This means I should be able to edit text person B contributes to the
ZDP, and C then edits more and adds a paragraph, without any of us
having to go through contortions. We need to be able to focus on the
job.

* We'd also like collective powers to decide on what happens with this
documentation. What we want is vaguely this:

   * Everybody on the net can use this documentation for personal use.

   * Anyone should be able to drop in and help with the text.
   
   * If there _is_ to be a book or something like that, the ZDP people
would like      to have some say in what happens. It shouldn't be a book
appears without at       least our knowledge.

Some other points:

   * It may not be too big a deal if someone uses the fruits of our
labors 'to get      rich' anyway. We're not into this to get rich after
all, we want good docs.
   
   * Digicool allows us 'to get rich' by giving away Zope. We might 
     want to follow their example. :)

   * We probably don't have to worry about these issues a lot at the
moment.

   * What happens with externally contributed texts? It should be clear
what is
     and what isn't a ZDP contribution.

Anyway, these are the issues concerning copyright we need _some_, but at
this point not a _lot_ of discussion about. I'm waiting for someone with
a good idea and/or more knowledge about these matters of collaborative
doc writing to step forward. :)

Regards,

Martijn