[From nobody Thu Jun  7 16:10:58 2018
From: Helena <hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu>
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> >Dan Jacobson wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > Just curious, what about like with the GNU emacs manuals, where the
> > > > paper manual is just seen as a way to support the project and have a
> > > > handy hardcopy.  The whole thing would also be available on line too,
> > > > in the spirit of the 'free' tradition.

Dan,

there are already free GRASS manuals (for users and programmers) and
tutorials available on-line and anybody can print them and bound them
to have a handy hardcopy. Both Markus and I have contributed quite a
bit to these manuals and keeping them up-to-date both in terms of time
and funding from my former projects. So there is already the free
stuff on-line and I am sure that there will be more, (we are still
contributing to that material). So I think that we have the
Stallmanist side of free documentation pretty well covered.

> > > So not to spoil the fun, but are there stuff that could be also put on
> > > line but now won't?  I suppose also one couldn't legally photocopy the
> > > book of course.  Sorry, I'm a Stallmanist.

The book is different from manuals and has different objectives and
approach to presenting GRASS - the major one being to establish GRASS
as a software and approach to GIS for both teaching at the
Universities and official use. It would have been very difficult to
write the 400+ page book (which is NOT an extract of manual pages)
without a contract and a publisher pushing you to finish it. And it is
not only a book about GRASS but it also explains various general GIS
issues and methods. On-line material about GRASS just should be done
in a different way, so I think that giving the publisher the copyright
is not such a big issue here.  If you do not buy the book you will
miss some of my nice black and white pictures, but then I have plenty
of free color ones and movies on-line :-).

If you want to learn more about the issues related to publishing books
about software I suggest that you dig deep into Tim O'Reilly's web
site (http://tim.oreilly.com/), it was quite an eye-opener for me (he
has some experience in putting his books free on-line, so just read
his comments about it).

Helena
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