Hacker News Reader

Full thread

simonsarris

This isn't exactly publishing.

Serious question: How would this be different (and better) than Wikibooks from the Wikimedia foundation?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

View on HN

If you put your book on Wikibooks, you don't own it.

Do you have a citation? I checked wikibook's Terms of Use and it didn't say anything about giving up ownership.

I should have phrased it better. Thank you for making me go look.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights#Contributo...

Your submissions are automatically and irrevocably licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA. Copyright isn't transferred, but since you cannot revoke the licensing you have (in effect) given up ownership.

You have in effect given out an irrevocable license to your work. This isn't practically or legally the same as giving up ownership, though it's certainly ceding a sizable measure of control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com