[PP-main] Roadmap and notes.

[Joakim Ziegler]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 02:41:45PM +1000, lists at itsg.net.au wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Joakim Ziegler wrote:

>> Licensing.
>> We need to figure out the licensing scheme. Raph and I talked a bit about how
>> this could be done, one of the ideas that came up was to let the content be
>> freely distributable within member sites, and let the author define what
>> policy he/she wanted for distribution outside of the Peer Press network
>> (freely available, for money, or not at all being the options). Of course,
>> this begs the question of what defines a site as being part of the network,
>> will being a member require that you syndicate all your content, for
>> instance? Opinions on this are very much welcomed. We should have a license
>> working group as well, I know Raph should be on it, probably me, and whoever
>> else who wants to and has some relevant experience/viewpoints.
 
> i don't know about anyone else, but i consider the collection of royalties
> and the control of information once it hits the internet impossible.
 
> i believe that if the author wants to get paid, they should get paid
> *prior* to the release of their work to the ppn (by a site that pays for
> the right to run the content first, not to retain the rights to the
> content).
 
> once the content is on the network, it should be freely available (speech
> and beer) under an appropriate license. trying to enforce it any other
> way will probably result in wasting people's time - not to mention the
> futility of such an effort.

I disagree. It's not that I think it's possible to retain full control of all
reproduction. In particular, small web sites, personal email, usenet, all
these are hard to control. But I reckon it will be fairly common for content
to show up on Peer Press that will be interesting to larger non-member sites,
like the Andover/VA sites, Linux Journal, Linux Weekly news, etc. Those sites
regularly pay people for royalties, and I expect they'd be interested in
continuing to do so, even if the content is available on other sites.

The way to facilitate this (because it's a good way to make lots of people
publish on PPN) is to make the licensing smart, so that member sites who
reciprocate the favor can publish freely, while others are left out unless
they pay (on the articles and content labeled as "otherwise available for
pay" by the authors).


> i am really interested in the working group for this area.

Duly noted. Depending on how large this group grows, we'll possibly start
another mailing list for it.


>> Software.
>> Maybe the least important at this point, but could nicely be done in
>> parallel, because it's going to take some time. The plan for software that
>> was posted elsewhere looks like a good start, let's discuss that, and see if
>> we can't set up a development team.

> i don't know whether you are referring to what I wrote up, but i'll just
> jump in here anyway 8^)
 
> i think it is more important to have something to play with in 3 months
> than to have a perfect design in 3 months. that is why i suggested the
> tools i did. they may not be perfect (ie. PHP/mysql) but they allow fast
> application development. once version 1 has been tested, the
> project will have a lot more people interested in helping and version 2
> can be re-written in whatever the team thinks is appropriate.
 
I agree. The XML DTD is probably the most important, though. It'll need to
work before we can exchange info at all. I'm fairly insistent on one point,
though, not using mySQL. If you're going to do this sort of thing, *please*
look at using PostgreSQL or some other free package instead.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - simplemente r&d director - joakim at simplemente.net
 FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
      http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.simplemente.net/