I spent some time today talking to James Vincent and Allison Randal about my proposal to write a Perl 6 book on Wikibooks. Jesse suggested I try adapt the recently open-sourced text of the "Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials" book as a starting point, so I don't need to start from scratch. The book was open-sourced by O'Reilly, and donated to the Perl Foundation. The Perl 6 portions of the book currently reside in the Pugs repository, and the Parrot portions live in the Parrot repo. I had done some updating work on the Parrot part previously, but not nearly enough to make it republishable.
The "Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials" book is released under the Artistic 2.0 license, which isn't compatible with the GFDL in use at Wikibooks. It's a shame, but not a killer: I've written dozens of other books from scratch at Wikibooks, and I don't view it as being a daunting task anymore. I think what I will do is eventually write two books: One in the Pugs repo using "Perl 6 Essentials" as a basis, and one on Wikibooks. I'll do it in such a way that newly-written content that I produce will be mirrored in both places as well as I am able. This way, I can reduce the necessary effort AND hopefully produce two high-quality books about Perl 6.
Allison suggested that for the Parrot book, it was far more valuable to the project for me to work on the "Parrot Essentials" book in the Parrot repo. This is fine, because I've already written a lot of content on Parrot at Wikibooks (over 150 pages at my last count), and much of that can be directly adapted for use in the repo because I'm the only author (and only copyright holder) so far. I'll focus on the book in the repo until the Parrot 1.0 release (when Allison would like to have a publishable book ready to coincide) and then start migrating some of my content back to Wikibooks.
In the world of open content, I'm a firm believer that multiplicity is key. If we make two copies of a single book in two places, they will eventually diverge to become two different resources. The more seeds I can plant, the more books will grow from them.
