I am nearly finished co-authoring a book on cloud application lifecycle management. It is about 250 pages long (70,000 words) It is currently Azure specific, but it extensible for other cloud platforms. My plans for the book are to publish it as open source. I'll probably host it on Github with source (markdown) as well as downloads of various formats (pdf, epub etc). I will also push it out to Kindle and Amazon, for the minimum cost, for people who want to find/consume it that way. The idea of the open sourcing it is to

* make it freely available, * allow people to make/suggest small changes (there is no formal editing and things may have slipped through) * allow people to covert it into various niche ebook formats * allow people to submit translations * allow people to create derivative works, such as taking out Azure specific and adding AWS specifics (I also am aware that people may not be interested enough to do any of those things)

What I am looking for is a license that allows people to make use of it, rework it, but not create a derivative work that they sell to a publisher (making it commercial). I can't necessarily limit it to pure 'non commercial' as people may 'sell' the book to cover printing costs, as I intend to do on Amazon. I would like to retain cover reference to the original authors too, but it is not a deal breaker.

I'd like some advice on a license to choose as it should be in place when I do my first commit. Should I go with a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) or is there a better alternative from the software world, like the [GNU Free Documentation License](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)? Should I drop the non-commercial, as it may be too much hassle? The GNU license seems to allow for 'compensation in exchange for copies'

Simon