"Open Source" Handbook - Githubissues

Both the Thesis and Clinic Handbooks currently live in "private" GitHub repositories (so only selected people can see them). Is there really any reason not to make them public?

I don't believe that there's anything "proprietary" or secret in the Handbooks, and having them in public repos would (1) make it easier to get bug reports, enhancement requests, or other feedback; (2) make it easier for other people to use our work for their programs; and (3) save us a (fairly tiny) amount of money.¹

I would expect that we would use a license that would require acknowledging our original authorship.

Good licensing options include

All of these licenses protect our rights as the authors of the documents and allow some form of sharing/reuse. The noncommercial Creative Commons licenses prevent some for-profit organization From=20using our work without our permission (outside of fair use). The ShareAlike variants require any derivative work to be licensed under the same sharing terms (i.e., someone could make their own version, but they'd still have to provide source code and license their work under the same license).

The GNU FDL is both the most flexible and the most complex. It allows for the specification of front or back cover texts (which must appear on covers if more than 100 copies are produced) and "invariant sections", which must be reproduced in any copy or derivative work exactly as specified.² It also allows for modifications, but has various requirements such as changing the title (so it won't be confused with the original), preservation of copyright notices and authorship/acknowledgments/dedications, and requires publication under the same license.

Note that the FDL allows commercial use, with the provision that the derivative work follow the rest of the license (e.g., requiring access to the modifiable original of the document; in our case, the LaTeX source code).

I would lean toward the CC BY-SA or FDL, myself, as I think our main interest is in making the material available for re/use, without any particular concern about someone trying to make a profit from publishing the Handbooks or derivatives (which probably wouldn't happen anyway).

It may be that the whole department needs to discuss the options, but I think that the set of chairs, Clinic Directors, and Thesis Coordinators are likely to have the most insight and the biggest stake in the decision.

1: I could also move them to an internal Git server, but (right now) that would be slightly more complicated for sharing information within the department, with students, and with the world-at-large.

2: Amusingly (?) the invariant sections and front and back cover texts make some people believe that the FDL isn't truly a "free" license at all.

harveymuddcollege / hmcthesis-class

"Open Source" Handbook #6