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.
Pages:
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393