On Wednesday 06 June 2007 16:27:28 Max Hetrick wrote:
pctech@mybellybutton.com wrote:
Unfortunately, I have had nothing, thus far, but bad experiences with wikis. Especially when you begin letting others "mark up" something that you've posted there. At that point, because your name is on it, you "own" all of their mistakes. I'm not saying that the CentOS wiki is like that, just wikis in general.
WikiPedia is probably one of the most horrifically obvious examples of what I am talking about. Not only do you have all of the blatant inaccuracies, which tend to get attributed back to the original article author, but you also have all of the drama that goes along with it.
Things start to go sideways when you begin to let others exert their own creative control over something with your name on it. I'm all for the free exchange of ideas, information, and knowledge. I'm not all for getting blamed for some crap someone added to something with my name on it. Been there, done that, don't need that drama anymore.
Some wikis, again I speak in general, not of the CentOS wiki, also demand that you turn over any and all rights to whatever you post there. While I enjoy sharing my knowledge with the world for free, I will be damned if I will give up my rights to profit from it in the future. Even the BSD license doesn't expect this.
This document, the firewall one, is the first in a series of documents that I plan on writing. I've worked very hard to get it to the state that it is at right now. It's what I consider a "living document" and will be changing as necessary. The second in the series is a document on building a network monitor based on open source tools. I've just begun writing it. I am hoping to have it completed in a couple of months, now that I have a format I am happy with for my documents. The third of the series will be on building a VPN concentrator based on open source tools. Part of what takes me so long to write these documents is that I don't actually enjoy writing. I enjoy doing. The firewall document started out of necessity to build multiple Linux based firewalls consistently and rapidly for myself and just morphed into something that I decided to share with the community. I figured that since there wasn't much out there that was useful others might like it.
While it's, most definitely, not the be-all end-all of Linux based firewall information, I think it's a pretty good document that I've worked very hard to write in a presentable manner that most people could understand and even expand upon for themselves. I am all for receiving comments and suggestions for future revisions of the document, any document that I write for that matter. I'm just not all for having my documents hacked apart by every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the Internet and then all of the misinformation getting lumped onto my shoulders because I happen to be the person that wrote the original document. I've already had enough drama from the CentOS forums where I got accused of being an e-mail address harvester for a spammer. No thanks. I don't need that in my life. I'm just a computer network engineer that THOUGHT he was doing the right thing by giving back to the community.
Understood, that's your right. It seems kind of silly, though, to go to the trouble of writing so much, then limit yourself with sharing to only a very small percentage of the CentOS community by broadcasting a message to e-mail you for documentation. Documentation is supposed to be readily available, that's the point of it, at least from my perspective, no matter what the license or stipulations of the content are.
Although you can pick out a license for your material that would cover protecting the interests you have expressed, yet at the same time allowing others to share in your material. One of the Creative Commons license, or another, would do the trick.
That said, do you not have a place to host the document then? It seems that if you've gone to that much trouble to write something, then perhaps you just need a spot somewhere to host the document?
Regards, Max _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Just a thought how about releasing it as a "how to"?