51–57 of 57 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the standard Apress contract now. Mark made his initial contract with Apress quite a long time ago when it was a far smaller company where special deals could be made.
wrong, i still make special deals with apress all the time :D
I don’t know where that leaves you as a business. I suspect this leaves Apress at the "Require all further authors to contractually promise us, in writing, that they are assigning Apress the exclusive right to publish/distribute the content and have not written any legal landmines which contradict this clause into the sections we routinely don't read".
I vaguely remember some terms that we agreed which made it favorable for Apress for the first few years, to give apress breathing room to recoup the investment we had made in Mark.
I took this to Gary and the rest of the editorial board, proposed why we should do it and how it could happen, and they agreed. I left not long after, but I understand Mark's book went on to several reprints and it seems new editions - all continuing to make for an excellent book.
I'm proud of bringing the book to Apress, and at the time we felt it was a really good match for a smaller pub to be able to do something a little non traditional and fun. I'm glad to see that it's made lots of people a good deal of money - and I'm sure that Apress don't want to lose the stream from one of their star performers. :)
It is hard though to keep making such unique deals as pubs grow- and, yes Joel - unless you are you, dictating terms isn't really something that most tech authors can do, as the secret is that only a very small percentage of tech books truly sell well. But all it takes is one committed editor who's willing to put their neck on the line for a good product-- and i think dip was one of those. :)
I was curious if the printed book included mention of the GNU license so I "searched inside" on Amazon. These two paragraphs are pretty odd sitting next to each other: http://timfreeman.org/copyright_dip.png
I complained about that, but it was too late to do anything about it. (You don't usually even see those frontmatter pages during the book-writing/editing/proofing process.)
I was curious if the printed book included mention of the GNU license so I "searched inside" on Amazon. These two paragraphs are pretty odd sitting next to each other: http://timfreeman.org/copyright_dip.png
I complained about that, but it was too late to do anything about it. (You don't usually even see those frontmatter pages during the book-writing/editing/proofing process.)
Awesome
Im confused too; in my basic Contract Law class, there's something called Value Received. If I don't pay for something, there is by definition NO CONTRACT. So any words (gpl etc) printed on the thing are just decoration.
http://lwn.net/Articles/61292/
Basically, if you want to do something that copyright forbids then you can't, unless you get permission. The GPL (and other share-alikes) gives you permission, as long as you obey its rules. Break the rules and you no longer have permission, just as if you were paying a monthly fee for permission and then stopped paying.