From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-07-09T23:47:12+09:00
Subject: PickAxe 2 licensing

Folks:

I've been thinking long and hard about the licensing of the new version 
of the PickAxe.

As you know, soon after publishing the original book we released it for 
free under an open license. We did this for two reasons. First, we 
wanted to see the Ruby community grow, and we felt that having the book 
available would help. We think that this happened. Second, we hoped 
that we'd set a trend, and that all Ruby books would end up 
open-sourced. This didn't happen. In fact, what seemed to  happen is 
that folks picked up the free version of the PickAxe and used the money 
they'd saved to buy one of the other, closed titles.

So, for the new book, we won't initially be releasing the entire book 
for free. Instead, we'll be contributing to the community in different 
ways. First, I've already taken all the updated reference section (with 
something like 150 new or significantly different methods) and released 
it to core developers. It's been used to add RDoc comments to the Ruby 
source. That represented many months of work.  Second, we'll use the 
fact that we're in control of the publishing process to keep the costs, 
and hence the price, down.

I wanted to announce this now so there's no surprise when the book 
comes out (probably in October).


Cheers

Dave