Re: NetEpic licensing

From: gavin_brown_2005 <netepic_at_...>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:23:56 -0000

Hi Nick,

> I've been considering altering the rules but hadn't really thought
> about the license. I assumed it was fairly open.

Unfortunately, because of the way copyright works, unless the
copyright owners explicitly give you permission, then the default is
very strict - other than for personal use, you can't do anything with
the work in question.

> By implication in the rules introduction, the rules are owned by the
> members of this yahoo group. Does that still mean members much ask
> for permission to change them? I'd also like to see a clear message
> in the rules regarding what is permitted, not just what isn't
> (profit making distribution).

Based on my experience of open source software projects, in order for
a copyright license change to be above board, you need to get approval
from anyone who's ever contributed more than a trivial amount of
content. That means those people who wrote the actual words, rather
than contributed ideas (ideas can't be copyrighted, only expressions
of them).

> I would like to see an easily edited version available. Would
> people consider that a recipe for confusing variations, and
> potentially leave no central focus for testing and improvement of
> the rules? This may not be an much of an issue as I doubt much more
> can be done to improve the rules now, while still keeping it in the
> Space Marine 2nd Ed style.

Again, my experience comes from the open source software world.
Usually, a project will have a "benevolent dictator" (Linus Torvalds
in the case of Linux, or Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia) and a team of
maintainers who s/he trusts to make changes. So a wikified NetEpic
might only be editable by people who have been vouched for by the
"anointed". Or you can make the wiki editable by all, and have a
review process, whereby edits have to be approved before they become
visible to the general public (most open source wiki software lets you
do all this).

Then, when you want to do a "release", you export the data from the
wiki, and generate a PDF.

The advantage of this process is that you get "version control" - you
can easily see how the content has changed, who changed it, and you
can also easily roll back to an earlier version. And a wiki program
like Mediawiki (which is what Wikipedia uses) gives each article a
"talk" page, where changes to a specific section can be discussed.

Gavin.
Received on Mon Mar 10 2008 - 22:23:56 UTC