Free as in Freedom, Sam Williams [feel good books to read .TXT] 📗

got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy’s comment about the publisher’s contractual obligations.

 

“So,” Stallman said bluntly. “Why should I give a damn about their contractual obligations?”

 

Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors over a 30,000 word e-book is a tall order, I suggested.

 

“Don’t you see?” Stallman said. “That’s exactly why I’m doing this. I want a signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as usual.”

 

As the words “signal victory” echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, “53rd and 3rd,” a song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable.

After weeks of gleefully recording other people’s laments, I found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise.

 

When I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher’s position and revealing my growing sympathy for it, Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked.

 

“So that’s it? You’re just going to screw me? You’re just going to bend to their will?”

 

I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again.

 

“You mean license,” Stallman said curtly.

 

“Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever,” I said, feeling suddenly like a wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water.

 

“Aw, why didn’t you just fucking do what I told you to do!” he shouted.

 

I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: “I don’t care. What they’re doing is evil. I can’t support evil. Good-bye.”

 

As soon as I put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured Guinness to me. “I figured you might need this,” he said with a laugh. “I could see you shaking there towards the end.”

 

I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn’t stop until the Guinness was more than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary of “evil.”

It felt weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a part of the world I’d only known through rock songs, taking meetings with publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I’d never even laid eyes on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life reflected back as a movie montage.

 

About that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in.

The initial shaking gave way to convulsions of laughter. To my agent, I must have looked like a another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. To me, I was just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. Deal or no deal, I already had the makings of a pretty good story. It was only a matter of finding a place to tell it. When my laughing convulsions finally subsided, I held up my drink in a toast.

 

“Welcome to the front lines, my friend,” I said, clinking pints with my agent. “Might as well enjoy it.”

 

If this story really were a play, here’s where it would take a momentary, romantic interlude. Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy invited Henning and I to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. We left the bar on Third Ave., headed down to the East Village, and caught up with Tracy and her friends.

 

Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book became almost a distant memory.

 

When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the preinterview negotiation. A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman’s “hypocrite” comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman’s media-savviness expressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it’s your call.

 

I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn’t making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first. By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year’s Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK

Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals.

 

During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so, since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I’d only received two emails from Stallman. Both chastised me for using “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”

in a pair of articles for the web magazine Upside Today. Aside from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose.

 

In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henning. He told me that O’Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a biography. The news pleased me.

Of all the publishing houses in the world, O’Reilly, the same company that had published Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied heavily on the O’Reilly book Open Sources as a historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with copyright notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again.

 

Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O’Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve special restrictions,1 Henning warned, but O’Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share and the book’s text regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License.

 

I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)See “The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0” (June 8, 1999).

 

http://opencontent.org/openpub/

gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium “physical or electronic,” provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of “substantively modified” versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval.

 

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),See “The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.1”

(March, 2000).

 

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license. It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions.

Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require certain forms of front-and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, however.

 

In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU Project web page titled “Various Licenses and Comments About Them.“See

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman’s critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL’s options to restrict modification. If an author didn’t want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the nonselected options popping up in modified versions of a document.

 

The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their original purpose-namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community. Since my book wasn’t a manual, I had little concern about the modification clause in either license. My only concern was giving users the freedom to exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either license suitable for this purpose, I signed the O’Reilly contract when it came to me.

 

Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for the e-book’s content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book.

At best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the Talmud, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins.

 

My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com/), the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960.

During the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project’s open source offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M.

Stallman didn’t have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?Anybody willing to “port” this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing technology, visit

 

http://www.udanax.com/.

 

When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O’Reilly, gave me a choice between the OPL or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing houses, Tracy’s included, were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not