
Ask HN: What are your views on open-sourcing literature? - sanketsaurav
Open-sourcing has done wonders in software, and now in hardware as well. How about, we open-source literature as well? We could have a platform like Github, just for those who write. Think of open-source fiction novels, non-fiction books, literary pieces, so on and so forth. What does HN think?
======
dragonwriter
People can make money creating open source software because firms making
commercial use of the software, offering professional services around it,
etc., are willing to pay the software developers, either by hiring them, by
funding non-profits that pay them, or by purchasing non-software materials
(e.g., books) from them. This makes it a viable economic choice alongside
creating closed-source software.

How does this work for literature? I see where "free" benefits those creating
derivatives and readers, I don't see how it would be viable for authors,
except, perhaps, with a ransom/patronage model.

Infrastructure-wise, existing systems that work for software (e.g., github,
bitbucket) are already optimized for text-based content and would clearly work
well for literature (in fact, they are already used widely for documentation
accompanying software projects, which is [technical, nonfiction] literature.)

------
gw666
I think this idea could work, and I don't see why an experiment couldn't be
done on Github--after all, it'd all be just text files.

People could fork, say, a short story, rewrite parts, and submit a pull
request; the original author would maintain control in this case. If the
original author didn't like the change but someone else did, that person could
fork the forked version (the one containing the change), add additional
changes, then submit _that_ as a pull request, etc.

It could get messy, but it also sounds like it could be really interesting,
with the end result being a tree of competing stories.

Maybe somebody could submit a short story, publicize its availability, and see
what happens.

~~~
sanketsaurav
Exactly. I think its definitely worth a shot. I'm not at all a literary guy,
but I tried to pitch this idea to some of my friends who write. While some
said its a great idea, others were skeptical. They argued, literature is so
different from coding. And writes don't like to share credits.

------
bowerbird
"it might be good for some other people," says every writer in the world, "but
not for me."

-bowerbird

