Re: octave tutorial

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Brian Blais wrote:

> Steve C. Thompson wrote:
> > Brian,
> >
> > This look great!  Have you considered licensing this work under the GPL 
> > and making the source files available?  Possibly this could help the 
> > document evolve more rapidly, requiring less of your time?
>
> I know *nothing* about licensing, and what it commits me to.


It is definitely worthwhile to learn a few things.  You note in your 
excellent document that Octave is "free" but I think you mean free as in 
$0 rather than free as in "free press."  For me, the fact that Octave 
costs me $0 is *much* less important than the fact that it is free in the 
other sense.  It took me awhile to realize how important this kind of 
freedom is, but now I think it is extremely important.  Here is some 
introductory material on the topic:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

I think that intro and the GNU GPL FAQ will teach you most of what you 
need to know.  That FAQ is here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Someone already pointed you to the documentation licensing pages.  I've 
been finding some pretty nice docs and text books distributed under the 
GNU Free Documentation License.  This "Introduction to Probability" is 
really great:

http://math.dartmouth.edu/~prob/prob/prob.pdf
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/zzyzx/zzyzx/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/probability_book/bookapplets/index.html

The book is still being sold for $51...

http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=IPROB

but you can get the PDF for nothing.

Mike

--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/



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