Re: [linuxiran] : redhat manuals translation,

[Aryan Ameri]

On Sunday 22 June 2003 19:57, Hooman Baradaran wrote:
> > I guess Kaveh means that you have to granted permission from
> > O'raily (or the author) in order
> > to go ahead and translate those books and maybe they want some
> > royalities (percentage) fees of every
> > sold book. Not the cost of buying the book! Am I right, Kaveh?
> >
> > I also read redhat's license agreement for the manuals and it says
> > somethings like "you are not
> > allowed to change or distribute them commercially and blah blah
> > ..."
>
> Assuming O'Reilly doesn't allow you to translate the books, why don't
> you just translate one of the GPLed books available out there?
> I couldn't think of one the free books I know but for example
> www.linuxfromscratch.org has a book that is really I creating your
> own Linux distro but has a lot of nice stuff (Just looked though it
> once.) Or maybe just take some one these nice online publications
> (like some of the stuff from Aryan's web site) and turn them into a
> book. Or if this is gonna be for beginners I liked the online course
> on linux.org.
> Or, how about the KDE hand books (if they're not already in Farsi - I
> only use Farsi to type my articles so I don't know much.)

It is always possible to write something ourselves. There are thousands 
of good manuals on the net, which one can easily gather and translate.

But, this is completey off topic, because I don't think that is what is 
currently needed in the Iranian market. People in Iran are not looking 
for manuals on how to congifure Apache, or how to write shell scripts. 
They want something, which gives them a good an comprehensive general 
idea about Linux, and gives them a peek view of what it offers and how 
it works.

A good programmers attitude, is not to write everything from scarth. A 
goof programmer's attitude, is to use something as your base, and then 
improve it. This at least the way Unix works. "Small is Beautiful" and 
"Build on top of others" are two popular sentences, in the Unix world.

It is always better to base your work on something that has been tested, 
and works greatly, than writing everything from scartch. In this case, 
it is always better to translate a O'Reilly book, than writing 
something from scartch.

And BTW, no, KDE handbooks are not translates.

Cheers

-- 
/* "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a 
conservative without changing a single idea." 
                        --Robert Anton Wilson*/
Aryan Ameri