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Open Sources as a historical reference.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.
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