Some friends of mine were over for dinner the other day, and one of them (Ravi Vakil) was asking me about possible licenses for an algebraic geometry book he was thinking of writing. He’d like it to be freely available, so (for example) students could download it, though he doesn’t actually want to put it in the public domain. (Which was my first recommendation, under the influence of this article by Karl Fogel.)
For software, of course, I’d have lots of recommendations: the GPL is one obvious possibility, but hardly the only one. For books, though, it’s not so clear; the FSF has something called the GFDL, but I don’t particularly like it. (I wouldn’t necessarily call it a free license at all; it certainly doesn’t allow others nearly the range of possibilities as the GPL does, though admittedly it’s not clear whether or not Ravi wants to allow other users those possibilities, either.) One source of possible licenses that I found was Creative Commons; are there other good sources out there?
As Ravi commented, he’d like to have the book already be freely available when he’s shopping it around to publishers, to present them with a fait accompli. Which makes me wonder: are there reputable scholarly publishers out there that allow their authors to make the books in question freely available in electronic editions? In my experience, scholarly publishers are in the dark ages when it comes to these matters: they still try (and succeed) to wrest the copyright of works they publish from the works’ authors. Which is ridiculous.
How hard would it be to start a mathematical press, for the twin purposes of giving rights to authors and of encouraging as wide a distribution as possible? (Which are, of course, conflicting goals.) If I could find some friends to help, I could imagine trying such a thing in a couple of years. Of course, there may already be enough people out there trying to do the same thing that it would be more effective to join onto an existing effort.
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Yes. My boss’s book (Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms) has the full PDF available for free download, and is published by Cambridge University Press. Sadly, he says that it was a huge struggle to find a publisher who would both allow the book to be freely distributed online and wouldn’t want to make the hardcopy book prohibitively expensive.
As for licensing, you’re correct that the GFDL isn’t a free license as the world knows it. Indeed, Debian have rejected it as being against their Debian Free Software Guidelines, which leaves them in the sad position of having to file critical bugs against any software distributed in Debian with GFDL-licensed documentation. (And the wonderfully ironic position of getting to tell Richard Stallman that his licenses aren’t free enough for them.) There’s a Debian GFDL position statement online.
– C.
1/22/2005 @ 1:30 pm
Interesting. Your boss’s book is, alas, copyright CUP – I really wish academic publishers would get with the times (or even with the second half of the twentieth century) and not try to grab copyright of everything that passes through their hands. And, while it’s available for a free download, it has other restrictions (albeit unclear ones) – you can’t make paper copies, but you presumably can make and distribute electronic copies (or can only the author do that?), but you presumably can’t distribute modified copies in electronic or paper form?. Still, it’s a start…
A discussion in Debian mailing lists was where I first learned about the GFDL. And Stallman’s responses were really depressing; as I recall, they basically boiled down to him saying “yes, GFDL products really are free, and people always bring up bad arguments against the GFDL, so I’m not going to argue with you”. Sigh.
1/22/2005 @ 9:32 pm