[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen documentation

[Dan Scott]

Hi Sally!

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Sally Fortin <sfortin at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> Friends and Colleagues,
>
> Many in the Evergreen community have expressed a desire for more
> documentation describing new features in Evergreen.  Others have requested
> that those who write documentation produce it in more formats, including
> asciidoc.  ESI trainers and developers have been thinking about how to help
> the Evergreen community meet its documentation needs and, to that end, are
> making some changes to the way that we produce documentation.
>
> In every new development contract, the cost is inclusive of basic end user
> documentation, written by our trainers, that will be released to the
> Evergreen community.  If possible, we will release documentation in advance
> of the scheduled software release.  We will publish the documentation on the
> ESI website in both asciidoc and HTML formats to make new documentation
> accessible to the community.  Community members or DIG members can adapt the
> documentation to community or local needs in accordance with the CC-BY-NC-SA
> license that is listed on each document.  Finally, we'll make an
> announcement to the community every time new documentation is available for
> download.  You can also check our blog or website for updates on
> documentation.

This sounds really great, but I have to note that the NC
("Non-commercial") clause is problematic. It is in some measure
incompatible with CC-BY-SA; it restricts the use of the documentation
significantly such that the DIG would probably not be able to
integrate the Equinox contributions as no commercial use of the
Evergreen documentation would be allowed - and the definition of what
commericial use is is very fuzzy.

For example, if a different company that offers Evergreen support
distributes a copy of the Evergreen docs as part of their Evergreen
support package, that could easily be defined as "commercial use"; or
training documentation derived from the Evergreen docs could be
defined as "commercial use".

Hopefully this is just an oversight and the real intention is to
release the Equinox-derived documentation under the CC-BY-SA license.