Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two
cities: New York, New York, the book-publishing capital
of the world, and Sebastopol, California, the
book-publishing capital of Sonoma County.
The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was
writing stories for the ill-fated BeOpen web site
(http://www.beopen.com/). One of my first assignments
was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The
interview went well, so well that Slashdot
(http://www.slashdot.org/), the popular "news for
nerds" site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA
Linux Systems and before that, VA Research), gave it a
link in its daily list of feature stories. Within
hours, the web servers at BeOpen were heating up as
readers clicked over to the site.
For all intents and purposes, the story should have
ended there. Three months after the interview, while
attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in
Monterey, California, I received the following email
message from Tracy Pattison, foreign-rights manager at
a large New York publishing house:
To: sam@BeOpen.
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