Towards 3.0

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Feb 6, 2013, at 1:18 AM, Holger Dinkel <holger.dinkel at gmx.net> wrote:
> On [06. Feb. 2013], Robert C. Helling <helling at lmu.de> wrote:
> 
>> I am certainly willing to do my share of work. But let me say that my 
>> experience is that texts do not get better if several people write them. I 
>> would opt for one main author and of course everybody can suggest 
>> improvements. Otherwise a lot of ironing out style differences will be 
>> required.
> 
> I hear you ;-)
> 
> How about this: 
> Tonight, I'll try to hack something together, then I'll paste the piratepad link for
> everybody to have a look and make comments and we'll see where to go from there?

Yes, I think that's a great idea. Usually the hard part is to get started, to get a first body of work together that others can then help to make better.
Which reminds me… all you German divers are using Subsurface in German and are going to send me patches for all the things that I got wrong in the translation, right?

>> Regarding republishing and licensing: I think you overestimate problems. 
>> The original authors have all rights and can of course pubish their work 
>> several times with different licenses, i.e. you can publish the same text 
>> once with a CC license say and still publish it in closed form in a 
>> commercial magzine (without the restrictions other people would face 
>> republishing the CC version) . You only run into problems if some 
>> media outlet insists on exclusiveness (like: If we take your article you 
>> are not allowed to republish it again on the German market).
> 
> ...and many do, sadly.

And we may offer them to take the article as a non-exclusive or miss out on it. Life is too short to worry about these things.

>> I also think you need different texts for different audiences: For the 
>> open source./Linux crowd that might happen to dive as well you probably 
>> want to write something along the lines of what Dirk did in his 
>> presentation last week (I guess). Dirk, do you have any notes or is there 
>> even a recording? If you address the general diver (with no particular 
>> computer background), you mainly want to explain what you can do with the 
>> programm and why it might be better than what they are using so far.
> 
> Dirk, do you think your presentation might be useful as a start or even just as
> a guideline to ensure all topics that you deem important are covered in the article?

Not at all. This was a talk at one of the best open source conferences (LCA) about issues with creating open source applications. It heavily used Subsurface as illustration of the points, but it wasn't geared towards divers as an audience.
My assumption was that this article we are talking about specifically targets divers, not hackers.

/D