[ug-bosug] Off-topicPlease suggest a license for my book : Programming with KDE4 Using C++

[S h i v]

Hi Manish,

On Jan 27, 2008 8:24 PM, Manish Chakravarty <manishchaks at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi BOSUG,
>
>  have finished majority of my book "Programming with KDE4"
> It is now 400+ pages. It will grow a little more (More on this later)
>

Congrats on the progress. You probably meant the mail to be sent to
opensolaris-discuss (I believe osol-discuss does not exist).

> Yup, it has a chapter on KDE4/Solaris ( see table of contents below)
>

Of course.

> I need to select a license for the book
>
> I want to be able to:
> 1) Let other people contribute/modify the book
> 2) Let the book be distributable over the internet, freely
> 3) I dont want people to pirate hard copies of the book ( if it ever gets printed, that is :) )
> 4) I want to be able to sell the book as well.
>

To satisfy Requirement #4, you would probably need to talk with a few
publisher(s) who would be willing to publish a book and also let you
make the sources available under an open source license. I believe
O'Reilly is known to do that.
One mechanism some follow is to publish the book and stagger the
availability of the free copy by 6-12 months, while some do a
simultaneous publication, while in some other cases open source form
precedes the final publication in the form of *always active draft*.

Requirement #3, can be satisfied if in the copyright, you explicitly
disallow hard copies for the commercial purpose.
Once published under an open source license, Individual printing for
their personal use cannot be disallowed and it doesn't seem right if
seen in the light of #1. (People should contribute, they should not
make hard copies, I should be able to sell).

> I want it to be free as in opensource ; not free as in beer.
>

As Anil commented CC-NC-SA might suit your need. But then IANAL.
You may want to checkout other CC licenses as well.

~Shiv