[Bf-docboard] FDL OCL Noob To Pro and Blender Manual

[David Millet]

Hi Tom,

Unfortunately I forgot to look into my crystal ball before starting the 
Noob to Pro wikibook.

>While this is long past the time of the original consideration -
>perhaps going FDL should be revisited?  Noob To Pro appears to stay
>far more current regarding the content for the English version,
>whereas for the non-english translations the Blender Manual is far
>ahead.
>  
>
The plan we've come up with so far (oxigen, Inktvlek, myself, and 
others) has been to replace the Noob to Pro book with something similar, 
but better, at wiki.blender.org.  Will that actually happen?  We've 
locked down write access to wiki.blender.org which means there will be 
fewer contributors and contributions, but it also means we have much 
better control over the quality of the content.  There's a serious 
tradeoff there but I believe that, between the different books that will 
be available from wiki.blender.org, we can draw attention away from that 
other book and bring it to ours.

One other thing worth mentioning is that we can, by obtaining the 
author's permission from the Noob to Pro wikibook, copy contributions 
verbatim from Noob to Pro to the new book.  I wrote a lot of those 
tutorials, especially the ones from the beginning, and I give permission 
for any and all my work to be copied over to be used as at least a 
starting point; a lot of other authors would do the same.  The reason I 
mention this is that we really have an opportunity to shift everybody's 
attention to something new at better at our wiki.

In fact, it's already started :)  Recently I created the first page for 
it at http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Books/Blender_3D:_Go_Pro%21

I don't think that changing our license is going to happen, but if it 
does, it's my understanding that we would be allowed to copy the entire 
thing over, which would be great as well.

>Having the two biggest sources of Blender documentation under
>different open licenses has the potential for lots of headaches in
>that it seems likely there will be lots of inadvertant copyright
>violation with stuff of one license being copied into the book of the
>other.
>  
>
I think you've identified a real potential headache here, especially 
given that both are wikis.  However, I think the potential for problems 
on our end is pretty minimal because we now absolutely control who can 
edit wiki.blender.org, so we can lock out repeat offenders at our wiki; 
how wikibooks.org handles offenders at their site is not our concern.

David Millet aka spiderworm