Add 1 to COBOL & OpenCOBOL, we’re your team for modern COBOL in the Internet age.

Licensing Statement

Last Updated on Friday, 5 November 2010 08:34 Written by Laurel Friday, 5 November 2010 08:03

This site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. We’ve chosen this license to give ourselves and our readers the flexibility needed for COBOL. From the start COBOL was an open standard. Open standards need open documentation. Such open documentation needs to be usable by everyone and not restricted. So we’ve avoided using licenses that restrict commercial use of the works that will be posted here. CC-BY-SA meets this requirement.

So, what does Creative Commons mean? This quote about Creative Commons licensing is taken from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions:

How does a Creative Commons license operate?

A Creative Commons license is based on copyright. So they apply to all works that are protected by copyright law. The kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings, for example. Software programs are also protected by copyright but, as explained below, we do not recommend that you apply a Creative Commons license to software code.

Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright—including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing—nor do they give you the ability to control anything that is not protected by copyright law, such as facts and ideas.

Creative Commons licenses attach to the work and authorize everyone who comes in contact with the work to use it consistent with the license. This means that if Bob has a copy of your Creative Commons-licensed work, Bob can give a copy to Carol and Carol will be authorized to use the work consistent with the Creative Commons license. You then have a license agreement separately with both Bob and Carol.

You should be aware that Creative Commons licenses only affect your rights under copyright. You are not licensing your trademark or patent rights, if any, when you apply a CC license to your work.

Creative Commons licenses are expressed in three different formats: the Commons Deed (human-readable code), the Legal Code (lawyer-readable code); and the metadata (machine readable code). You don’t need to sign anything to get a Creative Commons license—just select your license with our License Chooser.

One final thing you should understand about Creative Commons licenses is that they are all non-exclusive. This means that you can permit the general public to use your work under a Creative Commons license and then enter into a separate and different non-exclusive license with someone else, for example, in exchange for money.

So what does CC by SA mean?
This quote is from http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses:

Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

Choose by-sa license This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Chat Live Updated

Last Updated on Friday, 5 November 2010 07:05 Written by aoirthoir Friday, 5 November 2010 07:03

Today we dug into the Afterburner theme and created a new page template for chat. We’re hoping that this leads to a better experience for those chatting with us via the web interface. In playing around with it today, I definitely found it to be better for myself. So here’s what we did.

1. Eliminated the right and left side panel.
2. Widened the chat widget to the full width of the site.
3. Eliminated Author info, Comments and so on. Chat just needs chat and nothing more.
4. Made the chat area taller.
5. Put a green border around the chat to distinguish it more clearly from the surrounding page.
6. Reduced clutter in the title, and extra un-needed padding.

That of course gives us some ideas for the future. So some ideas I am tossing around include:

1. Creating Mozilla, Chrome and other “apps” out of our chat page, or just out chat room entirely and eliminating ALL of the non-chat related clutter.
2. Somehow publically logging the chats, right on the main chat link. That way anyone that missed out can catch up.

If anyone has any suggestions please post below in the comments section.

Publishing Privileges on Add1toCOBOL.com

Last Updated on Friday, 5 November 2010 07:35 Written by Laurel Thursday, 4 November 2010 02:47

Just a quick note about your publishing privileges on this WordPress site.  When you sign up on this site, you will be automatically granted the privileges of a Contributor on the main site, an Author on the Forum and an Editor on the Wiki.  What do these terms mean?

Well, a Contributor can submit posts, pages, comments and other content for review by an editor. Once an Editor has approved their submission, it will be published. This permission level is good for new friends who’ve just joined our site.

Authors on the other hand, can publish their own submissions without waiting for approval from an Editor. For the main site, we generally will make someone an Author once we get to know them better.

Finally Editors can publish their own submissions and edit anything anyone else has submitted. Editors for the main site will be rarer.

Why the difference? Well, we want the main content to be approved content. It’s our public face after all.

But Forums and Wikis have different rules.  A Forum is a kind of free-for-all, everyone is free to post whatever they want. This is good for asking questions, having discussions and so on. While a Wiki is specifically made so that everyone can post and edit any of the content.

These permissions will help us to keep spam to a minimum, while allowing great flexibility for everyone in our community. So if you want to post, or share articles, just sign up. If anyone has any questions about the permissions, feel free to contact us. You can email Aoirthoir via Add 1 to COBOL dot com or call him at 440.941.3396.

Add1toCOBOL New Site Goes Live!

Last Updated on Tuesday, 9 November 2010 11:44 Written by aoirthoir Tuesday, 2 November 2010 12:51

We’ve spent the last few weeks working, looking, searching, installing, testing and it’s paid off. We finally have a new site. I’ll update this post in a few hours detailing the specifics of the site, software, goals and so on. So stay tuned!