Re: Arabic Book Based on Red Hat 9 By Faisal Yousuf

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

Dear Liquid Crystal (!),
I had a quick look at your document. Seems that it is
the result of a great effort and will be a good
addition to the Linux literature, especially the
Arabic one.
I do have a comment though, about the licence. I
believe it will be much better if you put a clear
license that indicates the terms of usage as a
seperate page, reachable from the table of contents,
so all things will be clear from the outset.
Another point is that the license equivalent comments
which you are putting at the end of the document are a
bit problematic to my taste:
- The book is not usable for commercial purpose except
with the written consent of the author. Now that is a
problem, but I can do with it.
- The book is not usable for _academic_ purposes
except with the written consent of the author.
The last point is so complicating things that I read
nothing at it and will not try to read till I can use
it. Besides, I would like not to write a new book if I
can spare it, but these are too harsh terms for me to
use it.

I would appeal to you (Faisal) to change the licence
to a free documentation license; may be Arabeyes will
advice you about some, or use licenses compatible with
the Linux documentation project. This is more in line
with the feeling of open source/free software. And
will get more testing, advice and contributions from
other people.

While I am not in favour of licenses for
non-commercial or academic purposes, these at least
give your product more 'distributability' and will be
more useful for the community.

Yours sincerely,
Muhammad Alkarouri
MSc. Telecommunication and Information Systems
RHCE

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