Re: Publishing Postgres Manual as a book

> On 23/03/2023 04:34 CET Ian Lawrence Barwick <barwick@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2023年3月23日(木) 12:23 Erik Wienhold <ewie@ewie.name>:
> >
> > > On 23/03/2023 02:35 CET Siddharth Jain <siddhsql@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > The Postgres Manual is available online as a PDF but I think having it in a
> > > book form could be useful to some.
> > >
> > > Is it legal for me to publish the manual as a book?
> >
> > IANAL, but I'd say yes as long as you don't take a fee.  The legal notice of
> > the documentation grants distribution of the documentation "for any purpose,
> > without fee".
>
> Also not a lawyer, but the full sentence is:
>
> > Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
> > documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is
> > hereby granted
>
> which in my non-lawyerly interpretation means anyone copying, modifying and
> distributing the documentation may do so without paying a fee. A distributor
> could charge what they like.

I know the fee clause from licenses such as Zero-Clause BSD, ISC License, and
GPLv3.  They state "with or without fee" or "gratis or for a fee" pertaining to
the distribution.  That's also how I interpret the fee clause in the PostgreSQL
license with the difference that it does not permit taking a fee.

> AFAIR the documentation has previously been published in book form, though as
> it runs to about 3,000 A4 pages now, the logistics are non-trivial.

It's also out of date pretty quickly with four releases a year.

--
Erik